Guess what? We don’t like plastic packaging.
OK, so that’s no big surprise, but one of our particular pet peeves has always been the packaging used for liquid and powder laundry detergents. Have you ever stopped to consider where all that packaging comes from, and where it goes?
For liquids, it’s usually large, opaque high density polyethylene (HDPE) plastic jugs, the raw material for which is petroleum or natural gas. For powders, it tends to be hefty cardboard boxes lined with plastic. They generally also include a plastic strap carry handle and a plastic strip embedded in the cardboard that is pulled off to open the box.
Image credit: Dizolve
The laundry detergent cardboard boxes are essentially non-recyclable because the plastic lining contaminates the cardboard recycling stream. Thus, they end up in a landfill.
The recycling rate of HDPE bottles, as tabulated by the plastics industry, tends to hover around 30%. So that means about 70% of HDPE is not recycled, and ends up in a landfill, or worse yet, as plastic pollution on land or in our waterways. The scale of oceanic plastic pollution is enormous. Recent research pegs the amount of plastic waste generated on land going into the oceans at about 275 million metric tonnes annually.
A couple of years ago, a friend of ours who lives in our village of Wakefield offered to have us try some new-fangled, biodegradable, eco-friendly laundry detergent strips from the company he was working with. Enter Dizolve Eco-Strips Laundry Detergent. While made in Canada – New Brunswick to be exact – they were at the time much more popular internationally than in North America, especially so in Europe where folks tend to be way ahead of us when it comes to eco-living with a small footprint.
Each thin little movie-ticket sized strip is sufficient for a full load of laundry. They are free of parabens, phosphates, chlorine bleach, dioxanes, and added dyes, as well as being hypoallergenic, completely biodegradable, septic safe, and containing vegan non-animal tested ingredients.
This is how Dizolve describes the decreased eco-footprint of these Eco-Strips:
“Over 30 billion of loads of laundry are done in North America each year, and the environmental impact is massive. A load’s worth of today’s leading detergent weighs in at over 40 grams. A single Dizolve strip weighs less than 3 grams, or a whopping 94% lighter! With so much less to truck around, and no plastic jug, Dizolve helps you lighten your load on the environment. If everyone switched to Dizolve, the annual eco-savings would be enormous:
- Eliminate one billion plastic jugs (you read that right!), saving 700 million from going to landfills
- Save truck fuel and CO2 equivalent to taking 27 million cars off the road for a day, or planting nine million trees”
Zero plastic packaging and a 94% reduction in transporation pollution! That is huge, especially on a national or global scale.
This infographic gives you an idea of the impact in Canada alone…
You can find a detailed explanation of the sources and calculations that went into this infographic created by Dizolve here.
So we’ve tried out the Eco-Strips and were quite impressed with the cleaning power. They work just fine with both top-loading and front-loading High Efficiency (HE) machines – for front-loading you can tear up the strip a bit (I went overboard for our front-loading machine and did a lot more than necessary in the photo on the left – Dizolve says 4 or more pieces is fine).
They don’t create a lot of suds, but don’t let that throw you. Their cleaning power is solid and the suds-producing agents in many detergents are added for appearance purposes, not to enhance cleaning power. Dizolve uses a low-sudsing formulation that is HE-compatible and effective for all other types of washing machines.
We hope you will try them out and help “dizolve” the laundry detergent plastic waste problem.
You can purchase them here, and you can use this discount coupon code to get 10% off until June 2nd, 2015: MAY10
In fact, that code gives you 10% off everything in our online store!
One more thing… If you are looking for a completely natural, “straight-off-the-tree” laundry detergent solution with a similarly impressive eco-footprint, please check out our Econuts Organic Laundry Soap Nuts.