Richard Simon’s grandfather and father were stubbornly old-fashioned. Everyone else in the clothes cleaning business adopted chemical processes over the last 75 years, but the Simons continued to clean the wool and silk garments of London’s elite with skilled hands and mainly soap, water and steam.
Now Simon may be on the industry’s cutting edge with his old tools, making it possible to do away with the dangerous chemicals that are the industry’s mainstay. Chemical-based dry cleaning is bad for the environment, bad for the health of workers, possibly bad for neighbors and customers of dry-cleaning establishments and bad for clothes-which it often doesn’t properly clean, he argues. In its place he wants to offer the traditions honed in the family business, newly packaged with an ecologically green patina as Ecoclean.
Last year Americans paid their 27,000 neighborhood dry cleaners $5.3 billion to clean wool suits, silk blouses and other clothes they figure they can’t launder, according to an industry trade association. Most dry cleaners then washed those clothes in a chemical solvent called “perc,” shorthand for perchloroethylene.
Consequently, those cleaners released into the air an estimated 100,000 tons of perc, a hazardous pollutant that may cause cancer and other serious illnesses, according to a growing body of scientific research (it’s listed as a “possible carcinogen” by the Environmental Protection Agency, while the State of California calls it a known carcinogen). That’s roughly twice the level of dangerous emissions from the auto and fabricated metals industries combined, according to Greenpeace, the international environmental group. Furthermore, preliminary studies suggest that as perc breaks down in the environment, or is incinerated as waste, it forms even more hazardous pollutants.
Under increasing pressure-from government regulators, potential lawsuits, and rising costs of perc waste disposal-the industry has tried to reduce perc emissions with new technology. But the business is dominated by mom-and-pop operators, many of them recent immigrants, who often can’t afford the new equipment. Ecoclean offers an alternative that prevents pollution rather than restraining it.
EPA report coming up
Later this summer the EPA will report on tests of Ecoclean’s cost and performance. If the EPA gives Ecoclean thumbs up as an effective alternative, as Simon and his environmental supporters are confident it will, Simon should be able to win converts within the industry. Now, his techniques are used only by a few dry cleaners in Florida, Simon’s home base since 1986, and New York. But he might not have got this far had it not been for a few persistent environmentalists in Chicago.
Simon, a trim 45-year-old with wavy black hair highlighted with gray, started in the family business when he left school at age 17. His grandfather had emigrated to England from Germany in 1905 and started a tailor shop, which he lost during World War I, when he was deported to Germany.
By 1926 he returned and regained the business, called University Tailors. Simon’s grandfather advertised his “non-chemical cleaning” as better for the care of expensive clothes and developed a large, upscale clientele.
As a young man with a yen for adventure, the grandson learned how to clean clothes-with or without chemicals-by working his way around the world at dry cleaners from Paris and Hamburg to Thailand and Japan. He returned to University Tailors and started a couple of related clothing-service businesses.
But the skilled workers at University Tailors were retiring, and Simon despaired of replacing them. Further, he says, “I was suffering middle-age burnout. I wanted to existentialize my life, find new vistas to conquer. I was tired.” He sold the business in 1988, moved to Florida, learned to fly and traveled.
Yet just before he sold out, he began-for reasons he can’t recall-advertising his service as Ecoclean. A representative of Greenpeace saw his flier and took an interest. Simon now stresses environmental advantages of his approach, but he is driven more by visions of marketing triumphs than of saving the environment.
A charming, urbane pitchman, he quite frankly admits: “I am an opportunist. I am purely a person who looks at something as a marketing exercise.” Even now he works part time on marketing strategies for a chain of impotency clinics.
With visions of Ecoclean still in his head despite his retirement from University Tailors, he tried at first to persuade industry trade groups to adopt his techniques. But they showed no interest.
Then he tried direct advertising, “but there was no public demand for a cleaning alternative, because they didn’t know what was being done in the first place,” he said. He was about to give up.
Then he got a call from Bill Eyring, a staff engineer at the Chicago-based Center for Neighborhood Technology, which promotes environmentally safe economic development.
“It was a watershed,” Simon said, “when I saw someone in Chicago was so serious as to fly all the way over to London,” where Simon was making one of his frequent visits.
Labels misleading
Eyring, who was asked by Greenpeace to evaluate Ecoclean, took a bag of systematically soiled and stained samples to London, watched Simon work, and compared results with dry cleaning. He concluded that Ecoclean “is at least as effective as conventional dry cleaning for most fabrics and stains.” A report he wrote spurred the EPA tests.
Simon visited Chicago recently to demonstrate his techniques at one of Joe Caldwell’s several South Side dry cleaning plants.
Professional “wet cleaning” starts with careful inspection to determine the type and extent of soil, Simon explained. Despite the labels, 70 percent of clothes coming to a cleaners can be washed, Simon said. Lightly soiled clothes might be vacuumed, then steamed, tumbled with a fabric softener to shake out dirt, and steam-pressed. Other clothes might be spot-cleaned, using common non-hazardous chemicals such as ammonia, oxalic acid, acetic acid, hydrogen peroxide or salt, or partly soaked with cold water and scrubbed with organic soaps and shampoos. Simon sometimes uses a centrifuge to force water through the clothes as well as tumblers and a special forced-air dryer.
Caldwell was at first skeptical despite his knowledge of perc’s problems, then shocked at Simon’s vigorous scrubbing of a delicate velvet jacket, and finally so impressed with the results that he invited Simon to speak to a local trade group.
Good dry cleaners already use some of these techniques, since dry cleaning surprisingly does not remove many common stains or standard dirt, such as perspiration, urine and blood, Simon explained. Perc is good at dissolving oils and fats, but little else. Yet it also takes out natural oils from clothes and often redeposits dissolved oils on other clothes.
“The last time you wanted to degrease a fiber that was important to you, like your hair, did you use gasoline, which is a great degreaser?” Simon asked. Chemical solvents leave clothes, as they would hair, brittle and lifeless. Some cleaners charge customers to replace the body that chemicals take out of clothes.
Dry cleaning with chemicals won out, Simon said, “because it’s facile. It doesn’t require thought or training. But it’s doing to clothes what a doctor would do if he put an outpatient with a cold under anesthetic in case he needed an operation.” Wet cleaning requires more skill than dry cleaning but less capital.
Plans to make it work
Simon believes his process can be competitive in part because the costs of using perc are rising. Yet he also thinks people value convenience far ahead of environmental purity. So he wants to develop a network of key-operated drop boxes in offices, malls, stores and gas stations and deliver cleaned garments to home or work.
Jack Weinberg, the Chicago-based coordinator of Greenpeace’s campaign to eliminate the use of chlorinated chemicals like perc, wants the government and non-profit groups like the Center for Neighborhood Technology to help set up pilot “wet cleaners” that can demonstrate the commercial viability of this alternative.
Now the driving force in the industry is the equipment manufacturers. There’s not enough money to be made in retraining cleaners to provide a comparable market-driven force for ecological conversion. The government already helps big businesses, like the auto manufacturers, convert to pollution prevention, Weinberg argues. Why not the little neighborhood cleaners?
Weinberg wishes Simon and Ecoclean well, but the alternative is more than one proprietor and his marketing dream.
“This alternative will win out when it is given an opportunity to compete,” Weinberg argued. “All indications are it will be cost competitive and do a better job.”
Simon is betting that not only are the old ways best for clothes and the environment but also profitable for the grandson of a stubborn old tailor.
“I’ve not reinvented anything,” a sweetly smiling Simon said in his disarming, debonair fashion. “I’ve simply said, if you put the dry-cleaning machinery away, what would you do? There’s nothing you can’t do without it. There’s a lot you can’t do with it.”
