Conventional detergents - I call them so because they are what we most commonly find in stores right now - are detergents that have the characteristic of being ready to use : you buy them, go home, and use them as they are, without having to worry about anything.
They contain a high percentage of water (often more than 80%) so one day it occurred to someone that that water could be reduced: the first concentrated detergents were born, firstly developped for dishwashers and washing machines with claims like "you can put half a measuring cup instead of a whole one".
Later, this mechanism was taken to the extreme, removing all the water and leaving the world with super-concentrated detergents, most represented by powders, tablets and pods for washing machines and dishwashers.
But what are the advantages and disadvantages of this kind of detergents?
Advantages: less water = less weight, and therefore less effort
Ok, now I'm going to state the obvious but bear with me.
When you remove water from a detergent, you remove a "non-useful" part, given that it has no cleaning capacity. The net effect is that the necessary dose (i.e. the quantity recommended by the manufacturer to obtain the expected result) weighs less. So, for example, if before with 2 L of laundry detergent I could do 50 washes, now perhaps 1 L will be enough to do the same number of washes. So, with the same result, I saved 1 kilo of effort.
So less water=less weight, but also less weight = less effort for us, which will come handy when we are getting home in the evening with a work bag, a gym bag, the dry cleaning and we still have to stop for groceries. But above all, this means less effort for the truck that transported those detergents to the supermarket, therefore fewer emissions . Yayyy!
These beneficial effects increase as the quantity of water in the detergent is reduced, reaching their peak for super-concentrates, where the quantity of water is practically zero. In this case the product is essentially dry, so bottles will no longer be necessary. If you want to know more about super-concentrates, I have explored the topic in depth in a separate article that you can find here .
At a first glance, one could say that there are no disadvantages in switching from a ready-to-use detergent to a concentrated one: better for our backs, better for the environment. Win-win! What's tricky is that, despite having a detergent we could use less of, we unconsciously tend to "fill the detergent drawer", ending up overdosing on detergent, polluting more and spending more.
If we don't have a measuring cup at home, it is really important to be super aware of this mechanism and pay attention to it, otherwise we end up shooting ourselves in the foot.
