Cleaners

The federal Consumer Product Safety Commission has opened an investigation into two household drain cleaners, Lewis Red Devil Lye and Drano, after a trial-lawyers' group said Red Devil was linked to a score of consumer injuries, including disfiguring burns and eye injuries. Chemical drain cleaners may seem like a potent solution to a common household problem, but they are "among the most hazardous consumer products available," Consumers Union said on Wednesday. The nonprofit group urged consumers not to use them but instead to use a plunger or a plumber's snake, or to call a plumber.

When Earthjustice and other environmental groups announced last week that they were suing several major household cleaner manufacturers, asking that they be required to list ingredients, I was mystified. Don't they already? It set me to rummaging under the kitchen sink for my cleaner of choice. The first ingredient: "soap agents. " I noted it wasn't merely "soap. " The word "agents" sounded ominous. Second: "soil suspending agent. " These aren't ingredients. They're categories.

The first day of Ronald Castille's tenure as district attorney will be remembered by some prosecutors as the day they lost their shirts. Several assistant DAs who went to Sun Ray cleaners on Monday to bail out clean shirts for Castille's inaugural ball found their favorite dry-cleaning establishment locked. Taped to a door was a sign that said the cleaners, at 13th and Walnut streets, had been closed for non-payment of rent. The discovery triggered a DA shopping spree at John Wanamaker's.

Tomorrow's Army is going to be a lean, mean - and expensively clean - fighting machine. After 12 years of research and development, the Army has begun buying - for nearly $16,000 apiece - a fleet of custom-built, battlefield-ready steam cleaning units, even though commmercial cleaners can be bought for about $2,000 each. Government auditors are wondering why the Army plans to invest $100 million for more than 6,000 cleaners, especially in light of a couple of unsettling problems they've uncovered: The units can't routinely be used in peacetime because of environmental concerns and they're impractical for combat use because they're so noisy.

What makes people litter? Some think it's OK to add to a trash pile that's already there. And others just like to have somebody to clean up after them, according to a survey by Keep America Beautiful. Well, Philadelphia, it's our annual time to clean up after those slobs. PhilaPride, the clean-city booster organization, is looking for volunteers for this spring's litter-pickup, lot-cleanup and clothing-collection program. It wants to recruit 5,000 cleanup projects citywide for the annual Glad Bag-a-Thon that runs from March 25 to May 13. School and community organizations, businesses and other groups can stage cleanup events at any time during that period.

US Airways airplane cleaners faced a tough task yesterday - casting a contract vote that would put them out of a job. "That's the first time I voted yes to lose my job," said Steven Malti, of West Deptford, Gloucester County, who has cleaned airplanes for 15 years at Philadelphia International Airport. Under a new contract designed to trim $950 million a year in labor costs from the bankrupt airline, Malti and the other 250 airplane cleaners at the airport - all members of the International Association of Machinists - would be laid off, their jobs going to an outside company.

The same group of janitors that went on strike and shut down Los Angeles last year mounted a demonstration yesterday in downtown Philadelphia aimed at unionizing the workers who clean suburban office buildings. Banging on janitorial buckets and shouting "Brandywine, it's your time," 50 janitors picketed the Four Seasons Hotel where Brandywine Realty Trust, the region's largest office landlord, was holding its annual shareholders meeting. Brandywine Realty, in Newtown Square, owns 24 percent of the region's office buildings, both in the city and in the surrounding suburbs.

If your usually efficient neighborhood dry cleaner seems to be having a hard time concentrating on your explanation of how those stains got on your favorite power suit, cut him or her some slack. Long accustomed to regarding themselves as innocuous businesspeople helping their customers look their best, dry cleaners in September had to start thinking of themselves as polluters ranking right up there with the worst of the nation's smokestack industries. And if that wasn't enough, by December they had gotten their first dose of the bureaucratic confusion that accompanies many an environmental regulation.

Not long ago, Julius Scissor said, he trimmed the tresses of a woman who had never had a haircut. That same day, he closely cropped the hair of a male customer. Each paid $55, his flat price and one he insists is not based on gender - but on his talent and experience. "If men want to come into my beauty salon, they should not be quibbling about the price," said Scissor, whose given name is Frank Pinto and who owns Julius Scissor Hair Salon in the 2000 block of Locust Street.

A cleaning company accused of firing a mostly African American cleaning crew and replacing it with cleaners of other ethnic groups agreed to pay $452,500 to the cleaners and their white supervisor to settle a federal lawsuit filed on behalf of the workers. In the settlement approved in federal court in Philadelphia on Wednesday, the company, Matrix L.L.C., denied any discriminatory behavior. According to the suit, Matrix hired the white supervisor, Barbara Palermi, in June 2007 to oversee a crew cleaning a client's facilities in Delaware County.

AS AN INMATE laborer at the Curran-Fromhold Correctional Facility, Chal D. Kennedy Sr. worked in the kitchen, heating and serving meals for nearly 400 inmates and then cleaning up after them. That meant scrubbing down two giant ovens once or twice a week with a noxious degreaser that kept him coughing and left a sudsy sludge up his arms. "You look like you just came out from under an automobile," Kennedy, 46, of North Philadelphia, said of the two-hour, two-man cleanups. For the nearly three years he worked that $1.61-a-day job, prison staff ignored inmates' repeated requests for protective gear or training, he said.

David Fryar Jr., 83, of Browns Mills, owner of Burlington County dry-cleaning stores, died of lung cancer Friday, May 3, at his home. Mr. Fryar was the father of Irving Fryar, a wide receiver for the Eagles in the 1990s and now pastor of New Jerusalem Church of God in Mount Holly. David Fryar owned Fryar's Dry Cleaners in Browns Mills, Hainesport, and Mount Holly at various times, his daughter Melinda Jones said. "He was working at U.S. Pipe at the same time," she said, as a batch mixer at the plant in Burlington City for 32 years.

New Jersey Democratic gubernatorial candidate Barbara Buono shouldn't let her supporters squash a bill that would force secretive advocacy groups to disclose their donors. Sitting on legislation that would give New Jersey voters a hint of who is trying to influence the race for governor is as hypocritical as it should be embarrassing for the Middlesex County state senator. She sponsored a similar bill that died for lack of support last year. So-called issue-advocacy or dark-money groups are organized under a section of the tax code that allows them to conceal their donors.

WASHINGTON - The Obama administration will unveil a proposal Friday to clean up gasoline and automobile emissions, a step that officials say will result in cleaner air across the nation and slightly higher prices at the pump. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that the rule to reduce sulfur in gasoline and tighten emissions standards on cars beginning in 2017 could increase gas prices by less than a penny per gallon and add $130 to the cost of a vehicle in 2025. But the agency says it will yield billions of dollars in health benefits by slashing smog- and soot-forming pollution come 2030.

President Obama pledged in his inaugural address to tackle climate change, something voters didn't hear much about on the campaign trail because it is such a volatile issue. Recalcitrant Republicans in Congress are already signaling they will block Obama on cutting air pollution. If that happens, the president should invoke executive powers that he restrained himself from using fully in his first term when he was trying to find bipartisan solutions. In the last year, Obama has shown an increasing proclivity to use his administrative power, as he did when he smartly eased student debt through regulations and appointed a consumer advocate during a congressional recess.

The Center City steam loop, source of the Dickensian sidewalk vapor clouds that have warmed the soles of generations of pedestrians, does not normally evoke images of a modern energy system. But in the last two years, the system's owner, Veolia Energy, has quietly upgraded its century-old power plant in Grays Ferry to reposition the nation's third-largest district heating system as an environmentally friendly energy source. Veolia is calling it "green steam. " On Monday, Mayor Nutter and Robert F. Powelson, chairman of the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission (PUC)

Almost three years later, memories of the protracted, horrific death of 20-month-old Suliaman Orrell Kirkland were enough to move veteran first responders to tears. "In 14 years with the Fire Department, I've seen a lot of death and injured children, but this case is the most horrible thing I've ever seen," paramedic Colleen Stankiewicz said. Police Officer Judith Kinniry said she could not forget the sight of Suliaman in the emergency room at St. Christopher's Hospital for Children on Feb. 2, 2010, his skin sloughing off from chemical burns, his body trembling.

Former house cleaner Andrea Lawton changed her plea to guilty in federal court Tuesday as part of a plea agreement on charges involving the theft of a rare bust of Benjamin Franklin from a Bryn Mawr home. In exchange for her pleading guilty to one count of interstate transportation of stolen property, federal prosecutors will recommend to U.S. District Judge C. Darnell Jones II that the second count against her, concealing stolen property, be dismissed. The bust is said to be valued at $3 million.

Former house cleaner Andrea Lawton changed her plea to guilty in federal court Tuesday as part of a plea agreement on charges involving the theft of a rare bust of Benjamin Franklin from a Bryn Mawr home. In exchange for her pleading guilty to one count of interstate transportation of stolen property, federal prosecutors will recommend to U.S. District Judge C. Darnell Jones II that the second count against her, concealing stolen property, be dismissed. The bust is said to be valued at $3 million.

JACKSONBURG, W.Va. - Almost all the natural gas produced in the Marcellus Shale - billed by its advocates as the clean, domestic fuel of the future - is extracted from the earth using dirty diesel fuel derived from imported oil. Some Marcellus Shale producers are beginning to practice what they preach: switching to gas-powered drilling rigs that are cleaner, quieter, and cost less than diesels. On a remote hilltop in northern West Virginia, EQT Corp. began operating a rig in July powered by liquefied natural gas, which is brought in by tanker trucks from Pennsylvania.