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...again, this time to Berlin under the directorship of none other than Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. He did what he could to appease the Nazis, forbidding left-wing student gatherings and producing exhibitions of what he hoped would be seen as apolitical abstract work, but it was no use. In 1933, with Hitler firmly in power, Mies arrived one morning at the converted factory where the school was housed to find it surrounded by black-uniformed Gestapo. Soon after, he shut it down for good and made for the U.S., where Gropius, the Alberses and Moholy-Nagy would also...
...practiced by the vast majority of laundry shops around the country, dry cleaning can be anything but clean. Most of the 35,000 dry cleaners in the U.S. use a colorless liquid called perchloroethylene (perc) as a solvent in the laundering process. Perc is not pretty - it's a volatile organic compound that in small doses can cause dizziness, headaches and respiratory irritation. Prolonged perc exposure has been linked to liver and kidney damage, and the government has identified the chemical as a potential occupational carcinogen...
...cleaning workplace, perc can get into customers' homes and even into the air, water and soil when dry cleaners dispose of waste. But there are greener alternatives - and a growing number of cleaners taking advantage of them. One approach is to have your clothes professionally wet-cleaned, using cold water, mild soaps and a computer-controlled washing machine that spins very slowly, which reduces wear and tear on fabric. That may be the greenest method - wet cleaning uses no volatile organic chemicals at all and is more energy efficient than traditional dry cleaning. The downside, some have found, is that...
Another way to get a green cleaning is to use liquid carbon dioxide. CO2 is nontoxic - thankfully, since so much of it is in the atmosphere. In CO2 cleaning, clothes are put in a vacuum chamber with gaseous and liquid CO2, which dissolves dirt and oil. The drawback here is price: a new CO2 dry-cleaning machine can run more than $100,000. Cleaning green "does take longer and cost more," admits Kistner. How much more? Green Apple charges at least $6.16 to clean a shirt using wet methods or CO2. (See TIME's special report on the climate change...
Although green cleaners are still in the minority, government action from the top may make the shift inevitable - California is phasing out the use of perc, and other states will probably follow. "There's definitely a market out there," says Kistner. There's no reason dry cleaning has to dirty the earth...