National Clothesline

Crime doesn’t pay, but, apparently, criminals do.

Hormoz Pourat, who recently plead guilty to a class 2 felony of racketeering, knows this fact all too well. He and his fugitive brother, Harry, co-owned AAD Distribution and Dry Cleaning Service, Inc. and AAD Disposal, Inc., which were responsible for scamming drycleaners over a five-year period, raking in $80,000 a month from over 300 unsuspecting clients.

The company claimed to distill and incinerate the contaminated perc waste lawfully. Unfortunately, AAD chose a different path that involved mislabeling drums, forging documents and falsifying records to cover their dishonest tracks. They stored some of the waste inside warehouses and sent the rest to landfills in Nevada and Idaho. Perhaps they deposited their unused codes of ethics there, as well.

For his effort in the scheme, Hormoz Pourat was fined $100,000, with more clean-up fees coming later. And then there’s the little matter of his 17-year jail sentence. Still, the worst part of this illegal waste dumping drama is that dishonest entrepreneurs such as Pourat won’t be the only ones who suffer consequences. Already, the landowner of AAD’s rented warehouse facility in Lakewood, CO, was forced to pay $80,000 in remediation costs to clean up his property. Then, of course, there are the hundreds of cleaners who have already been victimized, but may still be held economically liable in the future.

If the landfills in Nevada and Idaho become contaminated and the perc waste seeps into groundwater supplies, the clean-up costs will skyrocket. If such a “worst case scenario” surfaces, AAD’s customers may well have to bear some of the financial burden of remediation. It doesn’t matter that drycleaners made a genuine attempt to follow the law. If the perc waste originated from your plant, it will always be your responsibility, from cradle to grave.

It’s not fair, by any means. It is, however, the law. Hopefully, the worst case scenario won’t come to pass, but, at the very least, cleaners everywhere should learn one important lesson from this fiasco: next time, be absolutely sure that the disposal company you do business with is following every last letter of the law. A lot of good companies got fooled this time around. It happens. It’s unfortunate. It’s even infuriating. It’s also in the past. The only thing you can do about it now is to avoid the same mistake. After all, in this case, criminals aren’t the only ones who may have to pay.

We can’t help but have mixed feeling upon seeing that the amount of perc used by drycleaners is continuing to decrease. The amount has been falling for more than 15 years and, in general, each year’s announcement of another decrease has been greeted with applause. No doubt the declines of a few years ago were largely the results of cleaners installing more efficient equipment and improving their operating practices. Perc use was cut by more than half from the mid-eighties to the mid-nineties, the period in which second- and third-generation equipment first came into widespread use. Machinery that needed more than 80 pounds of perc to clean 1,000 pounds of clothes was replaced by machines that used less than half that amount for the same volume of cleaning.

Between 1995 and 2000, drycleaners again halved their usage of perc. Since then, usage has continued to fall. The latest statistics from the Textile Care Allied Trades Association shows a 17 percent drop in the last two years. TCATA rightly congratulates cleaners for their continued efforts for greater environmental conservation and operating efficiency.

But the continuing decline also raises a note of concern. While improved perc cleaning equipment, better operating practices and growing use of non-perc alternatives are driving down the demand for perc, the lower demand also points to a lower demand for drycleaning. Casual styles of dress have made huge inroads into professional attire that provides the bread-and-butter for many cleaning businesses. A weaker economy, especially since Sept. 11, has customers stretching their cleaning dollars further. Yes, it is good to see continued implementation of better cleaning technologies, but it would also be good to see some signs of growth for the industry.