I rarely use dry cleaners, I make a point of buying stuff that is washable. That comes from the fact that I quilt and I have a bunch of friends who sew their own clothes -- ask anyone who sews, there are actually very few fabrics which are truly dry-clean only.
If one prewashes the fabrics in the way they are intended to be cared for before one sews, the garment/quilt is washable, period end of sentence. Most of the stuff one buys, even silk and wool (which were washable until the dry-clean craze showed up barely 200 years ago) is washable, but since the manufacturers are lazy and want to make as much profit as possible, they don't prewash the fabrics before they sew the garments. Then you may risk shrinking if water touches the thing, or "water marks" in the case of silk. They should have been dyed correctly and prewashed before they became a garment, duh!
Basically, the only male garments that are "dry-clean only" are suits, almost everything else they make for us are washable, but look at how they convinced the women that only crappy garments are washable, all the "fine garments" proudly sport a "dry-clean only" label! If they had made the garments right, they'd be washable too! Even suits are washable, I used to have custom made suits that would go to the washer and dryer, no fuss. Always came out perfect too.
Also, around here a lot of the cleaners just use a metal hanger, it looks like brass, but I doubt it's truly brass. I just put them in the recycling bin, no one has ever dared to tell me they can't recycle metal. I suppose it depends on what gets recycled in different areas, and how things are done -- here we have only *one* blue bin you put all the recyclables in, unsorted, *except* that the paper needs to be in a paper bag. In other areas (like my friend who used to live in Berkeley, CA told me) there are multiple bins and they might as well call your parents and tell them how *bad* you are if you didn't sort correctly or put something like wire hangers in that should not be in the metal recycling bin, 'cuz, dontcha know, dry cleaning is bad for the environment and the *best* way to convince people to not dry clean is to make the hangers non-recyclable and yell at people who put the hangers in the garbage, right? So she learned pretty quickly to put the hangers in the middle of truly disgusting garbage so they wouldn't see it and away it went. I think it'd be more productive to actually explain to people that they can in fact change the market to require less dry-cleaning and that a dry-clean only label does not mean the garment is better -- as a matter of fact, no one in the dry cleaners babies the clothes by handwashing them, they put the garments in a washer and dryer that is just as aggressive as any front-loader in your home, it just uses dry-clean fluid instead of water. YMMV.
