A New Laundry Product?

This laundry detergent is not new. It's been on the market for awhile. The company that makes it, method, is coming out with a new laundry product and Mom is dying to know all about it.

Today while I was reading a green business blog, I came across an article that asked companies which green initiatives they are most excited about for 2010. One of the companies asked was method and this is what their co-founder and chief greenskeeper Adam Lowry had to say:

"Our revolutionary new laundry product, which launches on January 11th. The product is the purest expression, not just of method's greenness, but of our ability to delight people with truly amazing product experiences. I can't share the details quite yet, but this product is going to shake up the laundry category in a big way. It is the most innovative and green product we have developed to date."

Mom could hardly contain herself as she leaned over my shoulder reading this. What could it be? How could a product shake up the laundry category and why do I have to wait to find out? Of course I couldn't answer these questions so I told her to ask Puglet's friend Google. I'm sorry to say that Google wasn't any help. Sorry Puglet but your friend doesn't know everything. I told Mom to sit back, relax, and let me take over the computer so that I could get to the bottom of this.

Mom doesn't use method laundry detergent. I'm not sure why but she doesn't. She has been using Vaska which she got from Alice a couple of months ago. She really likes it but says that it shouldn't be used on laundry that has really tough stains. That being said, she bought a bottle of the detergent she used to use, Ecos by Earth Friendly Products last week. Ecos has a GoodGuide overall rating of 7.9 with a health rating of 8.0. Vaska has not been added to GoodGuide yet but Mom is hopeful it will be on there soon with a great rating.

Back to method. Mom has purchased and used their liquid hand soap. She liked it so I decided to look into their current laundry products. The Squeaky Green Laundry detergent you see at the top of this post is the product that I decided to check out.

The method website had lots to say about this detergent and it sounded really good on the surface. The detergent is biodegradable and the formula is plant based, phosphate free, dye free and hypo-allergenic. There's even a link on the detergent page to 'find out what it's made of' which of course I had to click. The list of ingredients had one little item that disturbed me - fragrance oil blend. Hmmm. Time to click on the 'want to go deeper on the ingredients below?' link. Every ingredient in the detergent is listed here with a description of what it is and it's health & environmental summary. Listed second to the last of ingredients was the fragrance oil blend which is made from partially synthetic ingredients. Why do products need to use synthetic ingredients? They don't, do they? Why does method use them? Good question.

After checking out the method website I headed over to GoodGuide to see what they had to say about the detergent. Mom and I use GoodGuide all the time and Mom loves the scanner feature on the iphone app. Since GoodGuide is a work in progress, it doesn't contain every product in all the stores Mom shops at, but since method is a pretty popular brand I guessed they would have a rating for the detergent.

The GoodGuide overall rating for the detergent was pretty good, 7.2, but much to my dismay the health rating was 4.1. Can you guess why the rating was so low? You guessed it - fragrance. Fragrance is a controversial ingredient, not just in detergent but in everything that has a scent. Most products with fragrance contain synthetic fragrance and 95% of the chemicals used in fragrance are made from petroleum products. Bad and bad. There are lots of health risks associated with synthetic fragrances such as birth defects, cancer, central nervous disorders, and more. Additionally, if you suffer from sinusitis and asthma like Mom, fragrance is not your friend.

I had one more resource to check before deciding there would be no method laundry detergent in our house. You've seen me post about the Environmental Working Group's Skin Deep Cosmetic Safety Database before and this was where I was headed to check out method. Even though the name says cosmetic, lots of non-cosmetic companies are listed in the database because companies know consumers want to know how safe their products are. I searched method and found 36 of their products listed but not one of them was laundry detergent. Bummer. Only two of their products had a low hazard listing of 2 (the lower the number the better) while most were in the moderate hazard listing of 4 and 5. The liquid hand soap will not be invited back into our house.

So what does all of this research mean? Mom is no closer to finding out about this new mystery laundry product then when I started this research. We are a few hours closer to January 11th but what's a few hours in the grand scheme of things? The bottom line is that Mom is going to have to wait just like the rest of us.