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dry cleaning

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dry cleaning

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Also known as dry-cleaning, drycleaning

cleaning of fabrics in non-aqueous solvents

Wikidata facts

Subclass of
cleaning
Image
Drycleanmachine.JPG
Show 4 more facts
Commons category
Dry cleaning
topic's main category
Category:Dry cleaning
Merchant Category Code
7216
ISCO-88 occupation class
8154
Sources (2)

via Wikidata · CC0

~28 min read

Encyclopedic overview

A dry-cleaner in East Germany, 1975

Dry cleaning is any cleaning process for clothing and textiles using a solvent other than water. Clothes are instead soaked in a water-free liquid organic solvent (usually non-polar, as opposed to water which is a polar solvent) typically inside a specialised dry-cleaning machine. The most commonly used solvent is perchloroethylene (known as "PCE" or "perc" for short), although other solvents such as hydrocarbon mixtures and decamethylcyclopentasiloxane are also used. Historical solvents include gasoline, kerosene, Stoddard solvent, carbon tetrachloride, trichloroethylene, trichlorotrifluoroethane, trichloroethane and n-propyl bromide.

Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “dry cleaning” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.

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