![]() ![]() ❌ Ingredients derived from petroleum, like Alkylbenzene Sulfonates, acrylic copolymer, and PET. ✅ Ingredients derived from plants, like coconut and sugarcane. Read on to find out which laundry detergent brands in the UK are the most eco-friendly and which companies didn’t make the cut. I have read the ingredients lists and sustainable credentials of every brand listed here and put them into three categories: Sustainable cleaning brands use surfactants that come from plants, like coconut, instead. These are fossil fuels which are the main contributor to climate change and cause a devastating amount of pollution. The problem with ingredients is that the majority of surfactants (which remove dirt from clothes in water) are derived from petrochemicals. Like in August 2022 when Persil’s detergent advert was banned for saying it was “kinder to the planet” without any being able to provide any evidence of this. Greenwashing is when a brand pretends to be more sustainable than it is. This makes it super easy for companies to fool you. Would you believe that cleaning brands are allowed to keep the ingredients a secret in the UK? The ingredients look like something only a scientist can read… and that’s if they even share it with you. This led to a relaunch of the super-compact format as "New Generation Persil".Figuring out which laundry detergents are eco-friendly can be tricky. Afterwards, Persil were able to refine their main product's formula enough to produce comparable cleaning performance without needing a catalyst. A number of lawsuits were issued against Unilever by retail chains and consumers, but the vast majority of them were settled outside of court. Subsequently, a hasty reformulation with less catalyst was released, but that too was suspected of causing problems and was equally mired by the bad publicity.Ĭonsidering the embarrassment the episode had caused Unilever and the prohibitive cost of redesigning the product, they decided to issue a product recall and then simply abandon the brand. The effects were largely determined to be due to Persil Power being a little too powerful in the recommended quantities, and a chemical reaction (which Unilever had not detected) occurring between the catalyst agents and dyes used commonly in clothes. Further testing determined that while the effects weren't apparent on new clothes (which Unilever had performed most of Persil Power's testing with) they could become very quickly apparent on older clothes. ![]() Effectively, washing clothes in Persil Power had the same effect as adding bleach to the clothes. The most serious problem was that after a few washes with Persil Power, clothes first started to lose their colour definition and then their structural integrity, ripping easily under any significant stress. ![]() In May 1994, Persil Power was launched with a large publicity campaign, but a number of problems soon became apparent.ĭespite the large publicity campaign, the sales of Persil and Persil Power did not significantly increase, because Persil by itself was capable of dealing with most stains. To this end, they decided to split the catalyst agent (together with some fabric softening agents) into a new product, Persil Power. Unilever decided that the bleaching agents would be an ideal addition to the product, but had worries over such a major alteration to the formula of one of their main products (a high profile example of this being New Coke, with a more direct example being in the late 1980s when one of Persil's competitors, Daz, introduced a new formula that also increased cleaning performance, but caused allergic reactions in a small but noticeable percentage of the population). ![]() Unilever's research teams found a manganese(IV)-based catalyst that sped up the decomposition of sodium perborate and sodium percarbonate which act as bleaches in the washing process, increasing the cleaning performance noticeably and allowing use of lower temperatures. Given Ariel Ultra's success, and with Persil Micro System lagging, Unilever needed a new super-compact Persil line. Persil's main competitor, Ariel, had recently introduced Ariel Ultra, the first of the "super compacts" - washing powders equipped with chemical catalysts which (according to the advertising) cleaned better than ever, with less powder. Unilever decided that they needed a product with an edge in stain removal. In the early 1990s, Unilever's Persil detergent risked losing its market-leading position as independent tests were showing the major brands to have relatively similar performance in removing stains. Persil Power was a laundry detergent product developed and sold in the mid-1990s by Unilever. ![]()
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