Low-impact living: Last week I talked about laundry detergents, and this week I'm still up to my oxters in washing. For the past seven days, I've renounced all manufactured detergents, both conventional and eco-friendly.
I've gone extreme-green, and have been laundering my clothes with pods and balls. Using such environmentally-congenial products makes me feel virtuous indeed, but there is an underlying whiff of uncertainty clinging to some of the laundry loads.
The pods are the dried rinds of the fruit of the soap nut tree, Sapindus mukorossi (www.soapods.com). They contain natural saponins, and are used in Asia for cleaning fabrics. Pop a little cotton bag with six or eight pods into the machine with your laundry, wash at 40 degrees, and out come your clothes, as fresh as a daisy. Except that they don't, if they're particularly grubby or smelly in the first place. But if you add two tablespoons of washing soda, all but the most persistent evils are washed away. The pods may be used three times, and then put on the compost heap.
The balls - Ecoballs and Whirligig laundry discs, are three plastic spheres filled with mineral pellets. Place them in the machine among your garments, and wash. The pellet ingredients, which include silica, sodium oxide and a bunch of other oxides, raise the pH level of the water and produce ionised oxygen. These actions, apparently, break the surface tension of the water (one of the things that detergents do also), and help lift dirt away from fibres. As with the pods, serious grime and pongs are not shifted by the balls working solo. But a tablespoonful of sodium percarbonate (in the form of biodegradable and relatively safe Ecover laundry bleach) provides the muscle to shift these.
The balls seem to have slightly more oomph than the pods, and both work out considerably cheaper than detergents, in the long run. Sceptics suggest that in the case of the balls, it is the residue of detergent left in the clothes from previous washes that is doing the cleaning. I washed a load with plain water to test this theory, and the clothes were not as clean. Users suggest that something stronger than pods or balls is needed for whites, if they are not to become grey in time.
There is a third environmentally-sound clothes-cleaning mechanism, and it is wonderful for whites: sunshine. Wash them (with detergent, ball, or pod), hang them out, and wait. Stains are bleached, smells are evaporated, and germs are vanquished. Now, can someone find something to shift that cloud?