Low-impact living: Have you ever noticed how the shape of laundry detergent changes from year to year? From big-box powder, to compact powder, to liquid, to tablet.
Aside from their shape and odour, the popular clothes-cleaning potions and powders do not differ greatly from one another. The six leading brands that you are most likely to find in your supermarket - Ariel, Bold, Daz, Fairy, Persil and Surf - are made by just two multinational companies: Procter & Gamble and Unilever. We've used each and every one of them in our house over the years, but I wouldn't know the difference. Although, being pigheadedly resistant to advertising, we've stuck to powders, and more recently, tablets, because the latter are smaller, and thus kinder to the environment: less stuff to pack and transport, and less packaging to recycle.
Yet, in a report in last month's Ethical Consumer magazine (published by the Ethical Consumer Research Association, a British non-profit organisation devoted to human rights, environmental sustainability and animal welfare), the biggies come out bottom in their "Ethiscore" league table. Persil and Surf score 1.5 out of 20, and the other four mentioned above garner two points each. All lose marks in areas of environment, human rights, animal welfare and sustainability.
Top of the class, with a score of 16.5, is Bio-D (www.biodegradable.biz), made by a Yorkshire-based, family-owned company. Ecover detergent, owned by billionaire Jorgen Phillip-Sorensen, achieves 15 points. Besides being deemed more wholesome in the ethical department, neither Bio-D nor Ecover contains optical brighteners, artificial perfumes or phosphates: ingredients which can harm human health or the environment, and which are present in many conventional laundry detergents.
Astonish detergent (www.astonishcleaners.com) gets a mark of 14.5, despite being made from petroleum derivatives (and from what else it is not easy to discover, as the ingredients are not listed on the website). It is fully endorsed by the animal welfare groups, Naturewatch and the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection, and is suitable for vegans to use.
Two further brands, not mentioned in the report, but worth noting here because of their clean, green status are Ecolino (www.ecolino.be), also owned by Jorgen Phillip-Sorensen, and Lilly's (www.lillysecoluv.com), owned by Lilli Klint. The latter products are made in Castletownbere, in west Co Cork.