There is a quiet revolution happening inside a dry cleaning plant on the North Shore of Chicago, and it smells like absolutely nothing. That is the point.

While most dry cleaners across the country still rely on a chemical solvent called perchloroethylene, better known as PERC, one Chicago-area business has taken a dramatically different path. Urban Dry Cleaners, led by Managing Director Saj Johnson and Managing Partner Paul Dziekan, is building something that the dry cleaning industry rarely sees: a genuinely eco-friendly operation that does not ask customers to choose between clean clothes and a clean conscience.

The secret, if you can call it that, comes from sand.

What Is GreenEarth Cleaning, and Why Does It Matter?

To understand what makes Urban Dry Cleaners different, you first need to understand what most dry cleaners are actually doing to your clothes.

PERC, short for perchloroethylene, is a petroleum-derived solvent that has been the industry standard for decades. It is effective, no question about that. But it comes with a long list of problems. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency classifies PERC as a likely human carcinogen. Exposure to it has been linked to liver and kidney damage, neurological effects, and a range of respiratory issues. When clothes come back from a traditional dry cleaner with that sharp, chemical odor, that is PERC you are smelling. Worse, it lingers in the fabric, against your skin, long after the garment is hanging in your closet.

Some cleaners have switched from PERC to hydrocarbon-based solvents as an alternative. The problem is that hydrocarbon is still a petroleum product. You are trading one fossil-fuel-derived chemical for another, with similar environmental concerns around air quality and groundwater contamination.

Urban Dry Cleaners uses neither.

Instead, the company is a proud partner of GreenEarth Cleaning, a global network of dry cleaners committed to using a solvent that is, quite literally, liquified sand. GreenEarth's solvent is made from liquid silicone, which is derived from silicon dioxide, the same compound that makes up ordinary sand. It is inert, meaning it does not react with fabric fibers, does not accumulate in the environment, and does not leave harmful residues on your clothing. When it breaks down after use, it returns to its natural state: sand, water, and carbon dioxide.

For Saj Johnson, Paul Dziekan, and the team at Urban Dry Cleaners, adopting GreenEarth was not just a business decision. It was a values decision.

A Better Clean, Not Just a Greener One

It would be easy to dismiss eco-friendly cleaning as a feel-good compromise, a trade-off where you accept slightly worse results in exchange for a cleaner environmental footprint. Urban Dry Cleaners has spent considerable effort proving that assumption wrong.

Because the liquid silicone solvent is inert, it does not strip fabric fibers the way PERC does. Clothes cleaned with GreenEarth come back softer, not rougher. Colors stay vibrant rather than fading wash after wash. White fabrics, notoriously prone to yellowing under PERC treatment, stay genuinely white. And because the solvent is odorless, there is no chemical smell to wade through when you pick up your order.

The company operates a state-of-the-art in-house plant at its Skokie location, which is itself a point of difference. Many dry cleaners in Chicago and the suburbs are drop-off shops that outsource the actual cleaning to a third-party plant somewhere across town. With Urban Dry Cleaners, the cleaning happens on the premises, under the direct supervision of trained staff who individually inspect every order before it goes out the door.

This combination of green chemistry and in-house quality control is what Johnson and Dziekan describe as the Urban difference. It is not enough to use the right solvent. The execution has to match the intention.

Building a Green Empire, One Garment at a Time

Urban Dry Cleaners currently serves Chicago and the North Shore suburbs from two locations: the flagship plant in Skokie at 8824 Gross Point Road, and a Chicago location at 5681 N Milwaukee Avenue. But physical locations are only part of the story.

The company has invested in free pickup and delivery across the greater Chicago area, removing one of the biggest friction points for busy city residents who need their dry cleaning handled without rearranging their schedule. Customers can also book through the Urban Cleaners app, which brings the entire experience into the smartphone era.

The service menu extends well beyond standard dry cleaning. Urban handles wedding gown preservation, jacket and coat cleaning, executive shirt laundry, wash-and-fold laundry by the pound, shoe and sneaker cleaning, and restoration cleaning for garments that have been damaged by water, fire, or mold. The commercial partnerships division works with hotels, restaurants, and businesses that need consistent, professional-grade laundry services at scale.

Green commitment runs through the operational details too. Urban Dry Cleaners recycles customer hangers and plastic garment bags, reducing the plastic waste that traditional dry cleaners generate by the thousands every single day. The company is also working toward a more sustainable delivery fleet, recognizing that the environmental impact of a cleaning business does not stop at the solvent choice.

Why This Matters for Chicago

Chicago is a city that takes its environmental commitments seriously, and its residents increasingly want the businesses they support to do the same. The dry cleaning industry has historically been one of the more chemically intensive service sectors in any urban economy, and for too long, customers simply had no better option.

Urban Dry Cleaners is changing that calculation. By proving that GreenEarth cleaning is not only safer for people and the planet but also produces genuinely superior results for garments, Saj Johnson, Paul Dziekan, and their team are making the case that green and premium are not competing values. They are the same value.

For anyone in Chicago who has ever picked up a garment and wondered what exactly they were breathing in, Urban Dry Cleaners has a straightforward answer: nothing harmful. Just clean clothes, the natural way.

Urban Dry Cleaners operates locations in Skokie and Chicago, Illinois, with free pickup and delivery available across the North Shore and greater Chicago area. Learn more at urbandrycleaners.com.

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