New “Green” Laundry Detergent Wears a Familiar Label
潮汐purcleantargets eco-friendly consumers—and competitors.
学分：eviewed.com / chris thomas
Recommendations are independently chosen by Reviewed’s editors. Purchases you make through our links may earn us a commission.
Procter＆Gamble的人们希望白衬衫的承诺能够说服消费者改用更绿色的洗涤剂。
至少，这就是Tide Purclean的策略，这是一种新的洗衣粉，应该在5月上市。它声称使衣服像常规潮汐一样干净，但环境影响较小。
消息
Like other eco-friendly detergents, PurClean removes all dyes, optical brighteners, and bluing agents, and replaces most petroleum-based cleaning agents with plant-derived substitutes. PurClean comes in a recyclable bottle, and the factory where it’s manufactured runs entirely on wind power.
Unlike other eco-friendly detergents, P&G claims PurClean promises cleaner clothes. In part, that's because the formula is highly concentrated, but also because it includes some of the key petroleum-based cleaning agents of standard Tide. Like a hybrid car, it blends both conventional and eco-friendly technology in a package that P&G thinks customers are more likely to accept.
(Reviewed.com is currently testing Tide PurClean in our laundry labs, and will publish a full comparison between Tide PurClean and its eco-friendly and conventional competitors as soon as the product goes on sale.)
“这不是一个额外的步骤，这并不是什么新鲜事物。您不必接受新品牌的承诺。”北美面料护理副总裁Sundar Raman说。
潮汐purcleancomes in a clear bottle. It goes on sale in May.
Currently, eco-friendly formulas from the likes of Ecover, Seventh Generation, and Sun & Earth account for just under three percent of overall laundry detergent sales. But Raman hopes the addition of the Tide brand won’t just move PurClean—it will move the market. “If you think back to many of the products in green categories, they all went through this adoption curve,” he said.
PurClean旨在吸引主流用户产品mers with environmental concerns—the sort of people who drive fuel-efficient cars, but aren’t quite ready to switch to composting toilets. Everything about it is meant to feel more "natural" than traditional Tide. For instance, the recyclable bottle is clear to reveal the translucent liquid within. It will come in both scented and unscented varieties.
Whether consumers will buy a first bottle and be satisfied enough with it to choose a second remains to be seen. While chemists routinely tweak synthetic formulas to target popular stains, plant-derived detergents require significant research and development to find the right fit.
“If you’re making the molecule, you can make it however you want. If you get it from mother nature, you get it from mother nature the way it is,” said Peter Hauser, a chemistry professor who heads the Textile Engineering program at North Carolina State University.
There's also the question of whether it can get clothes clean. Hauser hasn’t had a chance to check out PurClean, but said that all plant-derived detergents have tradeoffs. “That’s not to say you can’t clean well with it, but natural resources are probably going to be more expensive than the synthetic ones,” he said.
的确，潮汐purclean仅来自植物的65％，预计一瓶Purclean的售价将比标准浪潮多一点。一般而言，创建基于植物的洗涤剂的过程可能比合成替代方案更多的能量，这解释了为什么P＆G在瓶子外面吹捧其可再生能源信用。
It’s currently targeted as a premium laundry detergent, but Raman says that the supply chain built for PurClean will eventually lead to increased adoption of plant-derived cleaning agents across all P&G products.
“Hopefully, the future is a lot more bio-based ingredients across all the brands,” he said.
