A plant- and mineral-based laundry detergent from ATTITUDE, the Canadian household brand — vegan, biodegradable, and free from the optical brighteners, dyes and phosphates that do most of the environmental damage in a conventional wash.
The most useful thing we can tell you about laundry has nothing to do with which detergent you buy. It is the temperature. Roughly 80 to 90% of the energy a washing machine uses goes into heating water, so dropping a wash from 60 °C to 30 °C cuts the energy used by that cycle by more than half. Modern detergents are formulated with enzymes that work perfectly well at 30 °C — the era when cold washing meant dirty clothes ended decades ago. Unless you are washing something genuinely contaminated, or someone in the house is ill, 30 °C is enough.
The second most useful thing: you are almost certainly using too much. Overdosing detergent is the single commonest laundry mistake, and it does not make clothes cleaner. Excess surfactant does not rinse out; it stays in the fabric, attracts dirt, makes whites grey over time, and builds up in the machine, where it feeds the bacteria responsible for that damp smell in the drum. Measure by load size and by your local water hardness, and use less than the cap suggests — dosing instructions are written by people who sell detergent.
What “plant- and mineral-based” does and does not mean. It has no legal definition, and it is not a synonym for harmless — plenty of plant-derived surfactants are irritants. What it does mean here is a formula built without petroleum-derived surfactants, optical brighteners (which do not clean anything; they are fluorescent dyes that make fabric reflect blue light so it looks whiter), phthalates or phosphates. ATTITUDE is EWG VERIFIED, which is a transparency standard from a US advocacy organisation rather than a regulatory one — worth knowing precisely what it is.
Note: Só Verde currently lists three ATTITUDE laundry detergents. Check the bottle for the scent and size before ordering if you have a preference.
Available at Só Verde, an organic concept store in Foz, Porto.
Attitude
Attitude
Attitude
Attitude
