A plant- and mineral-based laundry detergent from ATTITUDE, formulated for HE — high-efficiency — machines. Vegan, biodegradable, free from optical brighteners, dyes and phosphates.
What HE actually means, because almost nobody is told. High-efficiency washing machines — which now means essentially every front-loader sold in Europe — use dramatically less water than the old top-loading design: a fraction of the volume, tumbling clothes through a shallow pool rather than filling a tub. That has a consequence for detergent. With so little water, a normal high-foaming detergent produces suds the machine cannot rinse away, and those suds cushion the clothes so they tumble instead of being scrubbed, which means the wash is less effective. Excess foam also sits in the sump and the seal, where it goes stale and smells.
HE detergent is therefore low-foaming by design. It is not weaker — foam has never been what cleans anything, and the association between suds and cleaning power is purely a marketing habit from the 1950s. Using a non-HE detergent in an HE machine is one of the most common causes of poor wash results and smelly drums.
The two things that matter more than the detergent. First, temperature: roughly 80 to 90% of the energy a wash uses goes into heating water, so moving from 60 °C to 30 °C more than halves it, and modern enzymes work fine at 30. Second, dose: almost everyone uses too much, and excess surfactant does not rinse out — it stays in the fabric, attracts dirt, greys whites and feeds the bacteria that make a machine smell.
Free from optical brighteners — fluorescent dyes that do not clean but make fabric reflect blue light so it looks whiter — along with dyes, phosphates and phthalates. Vegan, and EWG VERIFIED, which is a transparency standard from a US advocacy organisation rather than a regulator.
Available at Só Verde, an organic concept store in Foz, Porto.
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