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This Hotel Vending Machine Will Do Your Dry Cleaning In About 5 Minutes

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If you've always shunned hotel laundry service because it's slow and expensive, a startup run by two Purdue Polytechnic Institute grads is offering a solution that's not only faster but more budget-friendly.

Sixteen Holiday Inns in the Midwest are piloting Presso systems — hallway vending machines that will clean and steam your clothes in only three to seven minutes without the hefty surcharge.

Presso is also more environmentally friendly than conventional dry cleaning. The most commonly used chemical in the dry cleaning industry is a solvent called perchloroethylene, or PERC, which the EPA has classified as a likely carcinogen. Presso uses a combination of steam, a non-toxic cleaning liquid and air drying.

“Our technology uses 100 times less water and three times less electricity per garment than laundry,” co-founder Thibault Corens told the Purdue Research Foundation News.

For guests, getting a quick clean and press is as easy as swiping a card and pushing a few buttons. While the Presso system is not equipped to get out stubborn stains — the team is working on that for a future iteration — it can quickly freshen up clothes before a meeting or event.

Presso co-founder Nishant Jain made the analogy that the steam cleaning kiosk is to dry cleaning as a microwave is to a conventional oven. “People have both microwaves and ovens, but microwaves are the ones you go to more often because they are quick,” Jain told the PRFN.

Presso recently raised over $250,000 at HAX, a hardware-focused accelerator program in China, and presented at the Rise conference in Hong Kong, according to TechCrunch.

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