Environmental Question #16 [Laundry Pods]

Courtesy of Reddit user u/lunalovegood

Q: For laundry detergent - which is the best option? I recently started using detergent sheets but have heard they release microplastics into the water. Thank you in advance for any info/advice you can provide - I really appreciate your post!

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A: grrrrrrrrrr this is an issue that I feel very strongly about, so I'm going to have a bit of opinion in here. First as a bit of background, "plastic" and "polymer" aren't necessarily dirty words, there are plenty of natural and biodegradable plastics and polymers. Heck starch is a plastic, and so is cellulose which is what makes up wood and paper. DNA is technically a plastic too, which I think is pretty neat.

Anyway, the main plastic used in detergent pods and sheets is called PVA (polyvinyl alcohol), also known as PVOH. PVA is a plastic with a mountain of reputable research showing that it is totally biodegradable into safe and nontoxic end products (alcohol and vinegar if you're curious). It can be made from plant-based sources, but it is usually made from crude oil for cost reasons. Even the oil-derived PVA is totally safe and nontoxic though. Despite this, a green cleaning products company called Blueland personally funded a single study to show that PVA creates non-biodegradable microplastics. The methods in that study were complete trash and its results have NEVER BEEN INDEPENDENTLY VERIFIED. They just did that to create marketing buzz for themselves to try to show themselves as the green alternative. This drives me up the wall though, because it's a green company attacking one of the few authentically green materials we have and giving it a bad reputation that could result in public panic that gets a perfectly good tool banned from the green toolbox. It's going to take a lot of effort to clean up the environment, so it makes my blood boil when environmentalists waste their effort attacking each other instead of the real problems.

To give you a complete and fair view though, microplastics are an interesting concern for the whole biodegradable plastic space. Even if we know that a plastic totally degrades into safe products over the course of a few months or years, it will spend part of that time as biodegradable microplastics, and since the materials are so new we don't really know if the materials might do any damage during the microplastic phase of their life cycle. Research is ongoing into that, but in the meantime it's at least certain that temporary microplastics are better than permanent microplastics, so biodegradable plastics are still an improvement.

The bottom line is use whatever laundry detergent you want. All of them are basically fine, none of them are particularly environmental disasters. If you want extra points, minimize the amount of single-use plastic packaging your detergent comes in, and try to use light weight detergents since light things use less fuel to ship.

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