GreenEarth Cleaning

Dry cleaners promotes greening of business »

Sean Dobbin
Staff writer

A dry cleaning company with locations in Brighton and Fairport will be giving away free trees to customers as part of a promotion for Earth Day, which is today.

Town & Country Cleaners will distribute a few hundred shrubs throughout the day, said Michael Micciche, vice president and head of operations for the business.

“They’re small plant-able ones about 5 inches tall,” said Micciche. “It’s for anyone who comes in for service.”

The tree giveaway comes a week before Town & Country switches to a cleaning method called GreenEarth, a process that uses liquid silicone to clean garments, rather than the long-used perchloroethylene dry cleaning chemical. They will be among the first Monroe County dry cleaners to install the environmentally-sound system.

Town & Country was on the verge of installing the GreenEarth machines two years ago, Micciche said. But in late 2009, state testing found soil contamination around Town & Country’s Brighton location on Monroe Avenue, and much of the business’s capital became tied up in testing and remediation. Testing has shown that the spill likely occurred about 45 years ago, before Micciche’s family owned the business.

“We wanted to make sure that when we made this move (to GreenEarth), we could afford it and also could afford our responsibilities of the environmental issues out back,” said Micciche.

The business has spent more than $160,000 on testing at the site so far, and will spend thousands more on remediation.

for the link: http://www.democratandchronicle.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/201104220500/NEWS01/104220338

SDOBBIN@DemocratandChronicle.com



Translate »
+