LAUREL, Md. — The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has officially designated perchloroethylene (perc) as a carcinogen and proposed a rule to ban it — but dry cleaners ended up with a better deal than almost anyone expected.

Jon Meijer, director of membership for the Drycleaning & Laundry Institute (DLI), has been working on regulatory issues for most of his 40-plus-year career there. He presented the details during a recent DLI webinar, “Regulatory Update for Garment Care Professionals,” and his message was clear: The industry got something it couldn’t have gotten any other way, and operators should understand exactly what that means for their businesses.

Concern about chlorinated solvents within the EPA dates back to the late 1970s, Meijer says, when the agency’s cancer assessment group began examining perc alongside methylene chloride and trichloroethylene. Decades of studies, proposed rules and industry negotiations followed. 

In 2024, the EPA issued a final rule under the Toxic Substances Control Act, officially designating perc as a carcinogen, and put forward a proposed rule to ban it across most commercial applications.

When the proposed ban came out, solvent manufacturers pushed back; a lawsuit challenging the rule is pending. DLI, however, went the other direction. The Institute formally supported the ban.

The EPA office that handles Toxic Substances Control Act rules, Meijer explains, typically moves fast when it bans a chemical, often giving affected industries very little time to transition. For dry cleaners, the proposed rule carved out a 10-year phaseout. That’s not standard, but the result of efforts from DLI and other industry agents.

“We got something that we could never have gotten any other way,” Meijer says. “It was because of what we did and the work that we did with EPA that we got this (10-year) carve-out.”

DLI put its position in writing. When solvent producers called, urging the Institute to oppose the ban, the answer was no.

“We said, ‘Heck no, we’re not going to fight this,’” Meijer says. “We got a gift. We know we got a gift. We got a 10-year phaseout, and it was many years in the making.”

Meijer says that there’s another wrinkle in this regulation that operators need to understand: The 10-year countdown doesn’t begin until the rule is formally published — and it hasn’t yet been published.

The delay is tied partly to the pending lawsuit and partly to the broader regulatory slowdown that has followed a series of executive orders issued since President Trump took office. Those orders can’t change existing law, but they can — and have — slowed the finalization of pending rules.

DLI had a specific reason for not pushing to reopen the rule, even with the publication delay.

“Anytime you open a rule back up, that means there are challenges,” Meijer says. “You open it back up, it could come back and it could be a lot worse. That really bothered us.”

There’s also a practical reality underlying all of this. New perc equipment has essentially disappeared from the U.S. market. The machines being sold today are multi-purpose units that can run hydrocarbon, CO₂ and other alternative solvents with only minor modifications.

“There are no perc machines being sold today,” Meijer says. “That’s the bottom line.”

For operators still running perc equipment, the 10-year window is real — once it starts. But Meijer’s advice isn’t to wait on it. Older plants, particularly those that used perc before the mid-1980s, may have some level of soil contamination, which can complicate a future sale. And the rule, when it’s finally published, could look different from what it does today.

“If you are thinking about moving away or trying to move away from perc, you should do so as soon as possible, because we don’t know what’s going to happen,” Meijer says. “Even though we have a 10-year phaseout right now, we don’t know what the rules are going to look like when they finally finalize it.”

Come back Tuesday for Part 2 of this series, where we’ll look at PFAS handling and the current standing of alternative solvents.