Greenwashing is a term coined to give a name to the practicing of some companies claiming to be green in their marketing when they actually aren’t. But, that is not what I’m talking about here!
I’m talking about being more green while washing your laundry. There are many chemicals we use to wash our laundry, many of the just plain bad. Bad for you, and bad for the environment.
Laundry Detergent
First, let’s talk about laundry detergent. It contains a number of chemicals in it that are just plain nasty. These are used as surfactants, fabric softeners, and colour enhancers. Worse living through chemistry!
Phosphates
The worst of all the chemicals in laundry detergent are phosphates because they are bad for the environment when they are mined, and bad for the environment after they are used. Double whammy!
Many, if not most, laundry detergents use some form of phosphates to increase the surfactant effect of the detergent. That basically means it disperses oils better, which is what you want when you are trying to get those oils out of your clothes and into the water to be whisked away.
Unfortunately, phosphates are also one of the three prime ingredients in artificial fertilizers. (The others being nitrogen and potassium — but that’s another blog post!)
Why is that a problem?
Well, these phosphates get into the drain water, which gets into the waste water system of your town or county where it is “cleaned” (not really), then into the rivers and streams, and eventually end up in the ocean. Combine this with fertilizers that are actually used on your lawns, gardens, and even on farms. It all gets washed downstream to the ocean.
What happens is this artificial fertilizer then causes massive algae blooms around the mouths of these large rivers such as the Mississippi or the Columbia river. Algae are essentially tiny organisms that get fertilized massively and grow like mad. This fertilization of the water is called eutrophication. What happens is that these organisms use up all the oxygen in the water to create a hypoxic environment. Below a certain oxygen level, fish in that water end up suffocating and dying, and all the fish or mammals that eat those other fish also experience problems because their food has died off. The area where all the fish die is known as a dead zone, and the one around the mouth of the Mississippi River this year was one of the largest ever because of fertilizers, and also because of the floods we had this spring in the mid-west washing them all down stream.
Dead zones have implications for humans not just because we have ruined an eco-system, but also economically. The shrimp industry in the Gulf around New Orleans is suffering massively, as is the fishing industry. Boats have to go a huge distance to find oxygen rich waters where their catch can survive. And the problem is getting worse as we use more and more phosphates.
The worst part is that phosphates are not only nasty after they are used, but they are nasty to produce as well! Mining phosphate ore releases flourides into watersheds. These are not the flourides that are added to drinking water to help your teeth. Many of the flourides released by mining phosphate rich ores are just plain toxic. They were doing fine in the ground there until we started releasing them into the environment in massive amounts!
Even worse, many phosphate rich ores such as phosphogypsum naturally contain radioactive materials, specifically uranium. This is not in quantities and concentrations that we can use for nuclear power, but it is radioactive enough to cause health problems. Once the phosphates get extracted from the phosphogypsum, the results are lots of plain gypsum that happens to be slightly radioactive.
You might be tempted to think, “hey, let’s press that into drywall and use them in our houses!”. A good plan, but unfortunately the radioactivity is at a high enough level that it can’t be used that way and it can’t be cleaned of its uranium easily. The difficulty in cleaning it means that the use of this type of gypsum is banned in many jurisdictions. It just sits there in massive piles and becomes an eco-hazard on its own. There is a billion ton pile sitting in central Florida for example, that no-one really knows what to do with, or at least has the political will to do anything about it. Slowly slowly, the rains are washing it away…
Allergies
Another big problem with laundry detergents is with such a wide variety of chemicals in each one, many people have become allergic to them. Some brands such as Tide have an “allergy free” formula now because of this problem.
One syndrome that has become much more prevalent in the last 100 years is Multiple Chemical Sensitivities (MCS). Essentially this syndrome causes people to become hypersensitive to a wide variety of chemicals. There is no real consensus amongst medical researchers as to what the cause of it is or even that it exists as a single definable syndrome, but one theory is that long-term contact with various chemicals somehow creates these sensitivities. Reducing exposure to various chemicals may not help this syndrome, but it can’t hurt! Maybe we should avoid them if we don’t really understand what they do to our bodies?
Besides laundry detergent, there are a few other things we add to our wash that wreak havoc on the environment…
Bleach
Bleach is a chlorine based chemical used to whiten and optically brighten colours in clothes. There are many different types of bleach, but the liquid we are most familiar with is sodium hypochlorite.
The problem is that bleach survives the wash and makes its way into the environment like phosphates. When this chemical comes in contact with any type of acid, as it might in sewage water, the chlorine part of the molecule is liberated and can combine with other nearby molecules. This can form many different types of chlorinated volatile organic compounds (chlorinated VOCs) such as chloroform and certain types of dioxins which are known human carcinogens and have other negative effects on the body. These chlorinated VOCs can stick around for quite a while, becoming persistent organic pollutants which can accumulate over time in the bodies of animals, including humans.
Fabric Softener
Fabric softener also introduces a whole host of chemicals into the environment, some of which are not good. There are a few based on various oils, which are more natural softeners and which are preferred.
So What Can I Do?
Well, you don’t need phosphates for a detergent, and you don’t need all sorts of weird chemicals! People washed their clothes just fine for thousands of years before all these chemicals were invented/discovered and added to detergent to improve various characteristics. There are new brands coming on the market that try to avoid all the problems listed above.
We have switched to a brand of detergent that is now being sold in Costco called “Ecos“. It contains no phosphates or bleach, has a soy-based fabric softener, and only uses natural oils and surfactants (such as magnolia and lavender) that can be easily biodegraded once they get into the environment. Best of all, the price is right in line with all the other non-green products at Costco, so there is no extra cost to switching.
We tried it, and there was no drop in the quality of the cleaning. Our clothes felt as clean as they normally do. I think we’ll stick with it!
Other brands that may be more available where you live:
Another advantage of using “green” phosphate and chlorine-free detergents comes if you have a grey water system or a septic tank at your house. A gray water system is one that reuses water from your shower, kitchen sink, or water from the laundry that is not really that dirty. It puts this water to use in places where you don’t need 100% clean water, such as watering your garden or flushing your toilet. If the detergent you are using to wash your clothes is biodegradable and non-toxic, it won’t kill your plants when used with a gray water system, and it won’t harm the bacteria doing their job if you have a septic tank.
Greening my House 
Tom Humes said,
2008-08-01 @ 02:42
Nice Site layout for your blog. I am looking forward to reading more from you.
Tom Humes