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Healthy Home Economist / Archives / Green Living / The Life of the Lowly Dry Cleaning Hanger

The Life of the Lowly Dry Cleaning Hanger

by Sarah Pope / Affiliate Links ✔

metal hangers

“No wire hangers, ever!”   Faye Dunaway once screeched in her infamous role as the monstrous Joan Crawford in the movie Mommy Dearest.

While dry cleaning businesses are a critical part of any community, particularly in urban areas, the amount of waste generated by all those cheap, wire hangers is clearly a disposal problem.  O. A. North of Connecticut is credited with creating the first metal hanger back in 1869.   Since then, the metal hanger’s popularity has slowly grown into an indispensable part of the dry cleaning industry although some plastic hangers are used as well.

In line with Ms. Crawford’s less than cordial recommendation, most consumers are quick to get their precious garments off those shoulder destroying wires as soon as they get home and onto hangers made of wood, sturdy plastic or cloth!

Considering that the average woman spends $1500 per year on average on dry cleaning according to Procter & Gamble, that adds up to one huge pile of discarded metal hangers on an annual basis!

Think of it this way, if the typical garment costs $3-5 to dry clean, each woman in the United States would discard approximately 375 cheap metal hangers each year into the trash!

Approximately 90% of metal hangers fail to get recycled likely because most municipal waste programs do not accept them as part of the community recycling program.

The track record for recycling cheap plastic hangers is not much better as the typical plastic hanger is made with a mix of plastic resins which make recycling very difficult.

So what to do if one wants to make the experience completely green by eliminating the dry cleaning chemicals along with recycling the hangers?

The easiest way to deal with the pile of dry cleaning hangers is to simply return them to your dry cleaner. Every single dry cleaner I’ve ever asked has gladly accepted them for reuse (they are cleaned first!) though some businesses I’ve asked over the years were clearly shocked at the question indicating how few folks seem to consider this important aspect of reducing waste.  I typically recycle my hangers with a dry cleaner I don’t even do business with just because he has a drive-through window which makes drop off of the pile of hangers especially easy!

Metal hangers can also be recycled as scrap metal, so taking your hanger stash directly to the local recycler works fine too even if they aren’t accepted with your recycled trash.

Since plastic hangers can’t be recycled at all, it is best to make the effort to return them to a dry cleaning business when you are out and about doing other errands.

Little efforts can really add up over the long term! How about your home? Do you make a practice of recycling your dry cleaning hangers?


Source

7 Items You Didn’t Know You Could Recycle

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Category: Green Living
Sarah Pope

Sarah Pope MGA has been a Health and Nutrition Educator since 2002. She is a summa cum laude graduate in Economics from Furman University and holds a Master’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania.

She is the author of three books: the bestseller Get Your Fats Straight, Traditional Remedies for Modern Families, and Living Green in an Artificial World.

Her four eBooks Good Diet…Bad Diet, Real Food Fermentation, Ketonomics, and Ancestrally Inspired Dairy-Free Recipes are available for complimentary download via Healthy Home Plus.

Her mission is dedicated to helping families effectively incorporate the principles of ancestral diets within the modern household. She is a sought after lecturer around the world for conferences, summits, and podcasts.

Sarah was awarded Activist of the Year in 2010 at the International Wise Traditions Conference, subsequently serving on the Board of Directors of the nutrition nonprofit the Weston A. Price Foundation for seven years.

Her work has been covered by numerous independent and major media including USA Today, ABC, and NBC among many others.

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Reader Interactions

Comments (18)

  1. Kelly

    Feb 22, 2011 at 9:02 pm

    We just discovered a wonderful new use for them! Last night my husband was getting his seeds started, and usually we just wrap them in plastic, but last night he had an AH-HA moment, collected all the wire hangers, bent them over the seeds and created mini hoop houses! YEAH!

    Reply
  2. Carla

    Feb 22, 2011 at 8:48 pm

    I have never in my life dry cleaned anything, even DH’s suits, which make it through the wash ok (and even if they didn’t, they were thrifted cheap; he wears them weekly and they’re good as new. We hang dry everything inside, which also saves on wear and tear and avoids shrinkage). I even hand washed my wedding gown in dental tablets as per the tailor’s suggestions when I got married, lol!

    I just had to say I was agog at the average woman’s yearly dry cleaning bill. Ouch! I probably haven’t spent that much on clothing for my whole family of 4 in the past 10 years! Sometimes I’m glad I’m not average, lol!

    Reply
  3. Heather

    Feb 22, 2011 at 4:28 pm

    The only dry cleaning we ever need is on the rare occasion that we attend a wedding or funeral. Even then I’ve managed to avoid it completely for my clothes (including my wedding dress) leaving only my husband’s one, lonely suit. When I go to pick up the suit I bring in my own hanger and immediately change them out and return the metal one to the dry cleaner.

    Reply
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