LOS ANGELES — There’s a drycleaner in my neighborhood that brags that, “The only greener way to care for your clothes is to use a rock and a stream.”
That drycleaner has no solar panels, uses fluorescent lighting (which remains lit 24 hours a day, though the business is closed for 10 of those hours), has no reusable or even bio-degradable packaging, and is in fact a perc cleaner. Why does the business advertise itself as green? “Because consumers like green.”
And why don’t they don’t incorporate any green initiatives into their operations? “We’ve run our business the same way for 50 years, we see no reason to change.”
What, I asked, would they think if other industries operated that way: no computers, no fax machines, no remote-controlled televisions. “That’s different, that’s innovation. This green technology is only a different way of doing the same thing.”