Is it just me, or has anyone else ended up with 12 million loads of laundry to do each week since this crazy pandemic started?
For real, when I lived alone, I could get by on one load a week. When I got married, we could do 2 loads every 10 days. After Stellan was born, we were up to 2 loads a week, but suddenly, I am running the washing machine every other darn day!
Being eco-minded, as I try to be, I really struggle with the thought of using as much water and as much electricity as I have been using to keep up with the mountains of dirty clothes we've created at bay. Another challenge is with laundry soap. It doesn't seem to matter if you use powder, gel, or those silly pods: the amount of plastic that goes into these products and their packaging is totally off the charts (i.e. something like 7,000,000 plastic laundry soap jugs end up in landfills each year... that's enough plastic to make 5 Statues of Liberty!).
What are the alternatives? Soap nuts are a good place to start, as they are natural, but they are also kind of expensive and often need to be imported, which cuts down a bit on their eco-friendliness.
A new alternative is Earth Breeze detergent sheets. Yes... sheets! No, they aren't dryer sheets! Earth Breeze has done some pretty crazy planet magic and has figured out a way to compress some soapy vegan ingredients into lightweight, foamy-feeling sheets that get tossed into the washing machine the exact same way that regular detergent would. They don't use water, the way that typical detergents do, so each strip is highly concentrated with green cleaning agents. After running your wash cycle, everything comes out clean and refreshed without producing any waste! It's brilliant because the sheets don't contain any plastic, and they come in 100% biodegradable cardboard envelopes, so those gnarly plastic jugs that I mentioned before never enter the picture. Some fancy experiments have shown that the cardboard sleeves only take about 3 months to break down completely.
Also, because these sheets come in packaging that weighs about 90% less, per unit, than traditional plastic detergent jugs, the amount of carbon released through burning fuel in transportation further decreases their overall footprint. I suppose that if I have to do tons of laundry, doing it in the most planet-friendly manner possible is the way to go!
Would you ever try a detergent sheet?
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