After being cited for the illegal disposal of hazardous waste, downtown Bend’s Mirror Pond Cleaners has gone green.

Reflections Enterprises LLC of Bend, doing business as Al Phillips’ Mirror Pond Cleaners, paid a $1,147 Oregon Department of Environmental Quality penalty for violations at its cleaning facility at 615 N. Franklin Ave., according to a DEQ report released Thursday.

DEQ found Mirror Pond failed to properly store, label and dispose of potentially toxic chemicals. The original penalty of $6,124 was reduced to $5,734 when Mirror Pond proved it worked to comply with state regulations for disposing of dry cleaning chemicals.

The penalty was then reduced by 80 percent to $1,147 because Mirror Pond proposed to spend $124,000 to replace the cleaning equipment with GreenEarth machines, which use less-toxic chemicals. Mirror Pond installed the new machines June 29-30.

Chad Allred, Mirror Pond Cleaners’ manager of operations, regrets the violations.

”It was expensive but it was time to start updating our equipment and do what’s right for our customers and employees,” Allred said. ”GreenEarth machines use a silicone-based solvent that comes from sand, so it’s proven to be safe.”

Allred said the machines are proving to work better than the old ones.

”I’m glad to see something positive has come out of this whole deal,” he said.

The violations were the result of a May 19, 2005, DEQ inspection of Mirror Pond Cleaners, which found problems with the handling, generation and storage of products containing the cleaning chemical perchlorethylene, commonly referred to as perc, a chlorinated organic solvent that can harm the environment and can contaminate groundwater, the DEQ report said.

Additionally, liquid perc can enter the human body through breathing its vapor or consumption. The most common effects of overexposure are irritation of the eyes, nose, throat or skin and effects on the nervous system.

As a result of Mirror Pond’s improper cleanup procedures, DEQ ordered the facility to immediately correct the violations and fully comply with Oregon’s hazardous waste and dry cleaning facility laws. The violations included a failure to identify some perc-containing materials as hazardous prior to disposal, which resulted in their illegal disposal at Knott Landfill.

In 1995, Oregon passed legislation proposed by the dry cleaning industry to address cleanup liability. The statute requires all dry cleaners to implement waste minimization and hazardous waste management practices to reduce or eliminate future releases of dry cleaning solvents to the environment, according to DEQ.