The Dirty Little Secret of Getting Your Laundry Clean

Sunday is laundry day in my house. With a four person household, I probably average about five loads of laundry per week. That adds up to be a lot of laundry detergent each year. Over 30 billion loads of laundry are done each year in North America, leading to about 900 million laundry jugs discarded annually in the United States. Once empty, only an estimated 30 percent of these high-density polyethylene (HPDE) jugs are recycled. The remaining 70 percent ends up in landfills or as litter.

I never gave much thought to the container my liquid laundry detergent came in until I started the Mind Your Plastic May Challenge and spoke to Mari Fox, the owner of Shecology in Weaverville. I posted about Mari’s story on May 6th. Here it is again as a refresher.

One day in 2010, Mari had run out of her favorite Seventh Generation laundry detergent, which couldn’t be found in many places at the time. She jumped in her car to drive to a market to buy the laundry detergent. While waiting at a red light, she realized how ridiculous it was to be driving all over town burning fossil fuel to purchase “eco-friendly” detergent that was mostly water, packaged in plastic and shipped long-distance by trucks to the store. Think of all the monetary and environmental costs of doing that!

Fortunately, Mari came up with a brilliant solution -- Laundry Pills! Shecology’s Mother’s Little Helper Laundry Pills are concentrated soap nut powder (we’ll get to soap nuts in a minute) in dissolvable capsules that you add to your laundry load. No plastic, no shipping of plastic jugs of water. And they work! The secret is the soap nuts.

From Shecology’s site: “What are soap nuts? They're actually not "nuts" at all! These curious little pods are harvested, de-seeded, and sun-dried fruit from the “Soapberry” tree native to Northern India and Southern Nepal. These towering, thickly vegetated trees are naturally organic because pests do not like the taste of their frothy fruit.
​
Of all the varieties of soap nuts, Sapindus Mukorossi is the best for cleaning because it is loaded with the natural surfactant “saponin.” When dissolved in warm water saponin transforms into a foamy substance that removes dirt and odors from most any surface – from textiles to tennis shoes!”

For those DIY enthusiasts among us, you can purchase soap nuts and make your own cleaners for everything from your hair and body to dishes and laundry. If you’re like me, and DIY projects are merely a fantasy, you can purchase laundry pills or laundry powder from Shecology online. 
Sincerely,
Dawn Chavez
Executive Director
Asheville GreenWorks