Laundry detergents have promised brighter colors and whiter whites for decades, but one brand of detergent is saying that approach should be hung out to dry.
“She should glow, not her clothes,” said a recent print advertisement for laundry detergent made by Seventh Generation, the eco-friendly line, which showed a young girl in a sundress.
Along with being nontoxic and biodegradable, the ad says the detergent has no “optical brighteners.”
Widely used in detergents for decades, optical brighteners work not because of what they lift out of clothes, but rather what they leave behind. The chemicals permeate fabrics, causing them to selectively absorb and fluoresce light to appear more white or vibrant.
The ad does not raise specific concerns about optical brighteners, but a Seventh Generation microsite declares: “Just say no to the glow!” and is more pointed.
“The environment doesn’t need optical brighteners in its waterways,” it says. “Your family doesn’t need them on their skin.”
Still, while the site says that the chemicals “can rub off on our skin where they can cause a reaction that looks like sunburn,” and that “they don’t -completely biodegrade and instead accumulate in fish,” it stops well short of arguing that they are a grave health or environmental hazard.
“We’re not saying the sky is falling,” said Maureen Wolpert, marketing director at Seventh Generation, which is based in Burlington, Vermont. “And we’re not disputing that optical brighteners work — we’re just saying that our detergents work without using them.”
While many consumers are wary of perfumes and dyes, leading most major brands to offer varieties that are free of both, little attention has been paid to brighteners.
Wow factor
“Because it’s a topic that no one really knows anything about, it creates curiosity and generates an: ‘Oh, wow,’” Wolpert said.
Hoping to elicit such responses, the brand sent samples of detergent as well as hand-held black lights and digital video cameras to mom bloggers and instructed them to wash similar shirts in conventional detergent and Seventh Generation. Then, the bloggers hung them side-by-side in darkness and shined the black light on them, causing the Seventh Generation shirt to barely appear and the other to glow purple.
The effort resulted in at least 34 bloggers posting videos about their demonstrations, according to the brand.
Some newer military uniforms are made of fabrics that are undetectable by infrared or night-vision equipment, but laundering them with products containing optical brighteners can render them detectable.
On Dec. 15, Seventh Generation asked visitors to its Facebook page with family members in the military to chime in about optical brighteners and about 50 responded, many saying that they used either Seventh Generation or other brands free of optical brighteners because they had been instructed to do so.
Since detergents generally do not list ingredients, military branches have researched which are free of brighteners and numerous Web sites, including Military.com, have published lists of about 20 suitable brands, including Seventh Generation, Woolite and dye and perfume-free varieties of All and Cheer.
Among those deemed unsuitable is category leader Tide, the Procter & Gamble brand that commands more than a 45 percent share of the detergent market, according to the -SymphonyIRI Group.
According to the Tide Web site, two optical brighteners — disodium diaminostilbene disulfonate and disodium distyrylbiphenyl disulfonate — are used in dozens of Tide varieties. (Representatives of Tide did not return messages seeking -comment on the use of optical brighteners.)
Mintel, a market research firm, called Seventh Generation “the home laundry category leader in environmentally-friendly products,” adding that the success of the brand was instrumental in the Clorox Green Works brand deciding to introduce a laundry detergent in 2009.
In the year ending Oct. 31, Seventh Generation detergent had total revenue of US$27.5 million, an increase of 1.5 percent over the previous year, according to SymphonyIRI, whose totals do not include Wal-Mart. That is less than a 1 percent share of the detergent market, which totaled US$3.62 billion.
Seventh Generation, which focuses marketing efforts primarily on social-media marketing and public relations, spent just US$99,000 on advertising in 2009, while Tide spent US$133.8 million, according to Kantar Media.
INCONCLUSIVE STUDIES
William Chameides, dean of the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University, said scientific studies about the safety of optical brighteners have tended to be “inconclusive,” generally finding no imminent danger to people or the environment, but calling for more studies to further assess risk.
On his blog, The Green Grok, Chameides occasionally examines ingredients in consumer products, writing recently about both formaldehyde, which is used as a treatment to make clothing wrinkle-free, and triclosan, which along with being an insecticide is added to toothpaste and other personal care and cleaning products for its antimicrobial properties.
“I’ve decided it’s worth it to me to expose myself to low levels of formaldehyde because in the job I have I need to have crisp shirts and I’m too lazy to iron,” Chameides said in an interview. “But there’s no way I’m going to brush my teeth with a toothpaste that has an insecticide in it.”
As for brighteners: “I don’t necessarily worry too much about optical brighteners, but I generally buy detergent like Seventh Generation because the stuff in them generally tends to be better for the environment,” Chameides said.
Convincing consumers to choose a detergent based on forgoing the additives may be a tall order.
“For the most part, people will relate to the fact that they have brighter colors and whiter whites as opposed to the fact that they have these optical brighteners,” Chameides said. “I don’t know what the decision process is for most people when they buy detergent, but I don’t think it’s a highly intellectual process.”
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