Clean Can Be Green
Blue Sky cleaner Mark Callaghan wants to save the planet, one shirt at a time.
FOR TWO DECADES Mark Callaghan followed a typical high-tech career path. A third-generation Seattleite, Callaghan graduated from UW in international studies in 1986 and started out in telecommunications at the pioneering McCaw Cellular. Next he cofounded PhotoDisc, a royalty-free photo stock agency subsequently sold to Getty Images. And then this well-groomed family man, the quintessential young high-tech executive, switched to a much less glamorous field: the mom-and-pop business of dry cleaning. Was he crazy?
No, just green. Callaghan is active in his sons’ elementary school, where sustainability is a big part of the curriculum. He’s installed solar heating and hot water in his own home. And when the time came to scope out new business opportunities, Callaghan sought one with long-term prospects that would benefit the planet’s bottom line as well as his own.
Dry cleaning might seem an unlikely choice: 85 percent of cleaners in the United States use the “perc process”—perchloro-ethylene, a highly toxic carcinogen. Others use a petroleum-derived solvent or the somewhat less toxic silicon-based GreenEarth method. Friends in Colorado told Callaghan about Revolution Cleaners, a Denver company that cleans clothes with odorless, nontoxic, reclaimed carbon dioxide pressurized into a liquid. While at PhotoDisc, Callaghan had already seen how a new technology—digital photography—could transform an entire industry. He suspected liquid CO2 might work the same magic on dry cleaning.
Callaghan purchased Blue Sky Cleaners, a small CO2 cleaning chain in the Bay Area. Last September he brought the brand and the technology to his hometown, launching a cleaning plant on Elliott Avenue. Two months later he bought the long-established Four Seasons Cleaners, with two stores, and Blue Sky became one of Seattle’s leading cleaners.
Callaghan gladly tapped into Four Seasons’ production and pressing expertise, and its established pickup and delivery routes. But the first thing he did was shut down its perc-based cleaning plant. Four Seasons’ former owner, Dick Pakko, stayed on as an adviser to Blue Sky, though he admits he didn’t realize how popular the new approach would prove. Now he’s a believer: “Our marketplace is really truly ready for green cleaners,” Pakko says.
Published: June 2009
I thought Co-2 was bad for the environment too?