Concentrated Liquid Cleansers: Eco-Friendly or Eco-Scam?
It makes sense: concentrated liquid soaps contain less water and therefore use less energy, cost less money, and emit less CO2 to transport to their destination. Wal-Mart converted its entire line of laundry detergent to concentrated over the past few months, claiming its initiative is:
- Saving over 95 million pounds of plastic resin
- Preserving more than 400 million gallons of water
- Conserving over 520,000 gallons of diesel gasoline
- Reducing more than 125 million pounds of cardboard
Still, that's not definitive: perhaps the concentrated version's thicker texture slows its exit from the bottle. It's not easy to dispense a single drop, so I attempted to dispense the smallest practical amount, as one would when washing a pot for example. I did this 25 times from each bottle and weighed the result on my reloading scale, accurate to about 2/10 of a grain. (There are 7,000 grains to the pound.)
The result: Regular Joy dispensed 30.3 grains of soap. Ultra-Concentrated Joy was more difficult to dispense, as some of the thicker liquid tended to cling to the cap and run down the bottle rather than into the cup, but the weight of the liquid in the cup was 31.4 grains— about the same as regular Joy considering how difficult it is to get a consistent "drop" from the bottle, and certainly not a reduction.
I contacted Proctor & Gamble and asked for a comment on my test results, but so far they haven't responded. An inquiry to Wal-Mart yielded the following (somewhat off-topic) response: "We have found that our customers have embraced smaller, concentrated laundry detergent. And we continue to encourage our customers to read the label when using concentrated laundry detergent because a little goes a long way!"
I can only conclude from my testing (and P&G's and Wal-Mart's lack of rebuttal) that the types of concentrated soaps not measured by the consumer do not result in less soap used. And, not surprisingly, the concentrated product costs more: I bought 16 ounces of Joy Non-Ultra for $.99, or 6.19 cents per ounce, but Walgreens sells 12.6 ounces of Joy Ultra for $1.89, or 15 cents per ounce. So P&G (and presumably Wal-Mart too) makes more money by selling the concentrated product and having the consumer use the same amount as before.
Eco-friendly? Not quite. I have to conclude that concentrated dish soaps (and probably concentrated hand soaps as well) are an eco-scam.
I think about this often and try to remind myself to measure concentrated soaps. I also keep an attractive bottle at the kitchen sink for my dish soap and I dilute it by at least half when I fill it. Thanks for the reminder.
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