DISQUS

Michael Carnell · 1 year ago

Very interesting. I have been waiting for results on this. As you say, it seems interesting - but a little too good to be true. My biggest concern is all the germs, bacteria and such. Lots of things can smell clean, but are they really clean? A little scientific data, and less marketing talk, would go a long way to convincing me to buy one.

Chris Baskind · 1 year ago

Without some idea of the active ingredients in the GreenWashBall, it's difficult to evaluate its safety or effectiveness. Their rather some rather sweeping health claims would be more credible if backed by independent lab reports. Further, I'd like to know if this casing is PVC -- and why the company hasn't labeled it for recycling.

cr8tvjen · 1 year ago

You are right to be skeptical on the this ball being pure GreenWashing at its best. I'm a total newbie to green living, but I do remember the year 1996 and the MLM phenomenon was this "Blue Laundry Ball". Supposedly it worked by generating positive or negative charges in your water by the little 'magic' metal balls that bounced around inside of it and !POOF! the dirt in your wash was whisked away!

After months of growing their distributor base by the 10's of thousands, the scam was finally revealed and instead of magically washing your clothes, we all found out the truth:
(disclaimer: i'm recalling the following information 12 years after learning it, so i might be off a bit here and there, but as a mom and ceo of our hundreds of loads of laundry each year, i'm pretty sure i'm an expert!)

...we are all using WAY too much detergent as it is, a large percentage of which doesn't rinse out, even with fancy machines, and in turn gets backed up into our fabrics and clogs the fibers weave. So, common sense tells us that we could probably wash our clothes at least 2 or 3 times with just water and we would get fabulous or "magic" results...

Cheetah · 1 year ago

so...where would I get one to try for myself?

Chris Baskind · 1 year ago

It's linked in the first paragraph, if you're so inclined. I think it retails for $49.

Fake Plastic Fish · 1 year ago

Thank you for such a thorough, thoughtful, and skeptical review. So many green bloggers these days just accept whatever marketing companies tell them without question and regurgitate the results on their sites. I really, really appreciated reading this, and it was fun. Kinda like a mystery!

Chriswaterguy · 1 year ago

Impressive review. Green thinking needs to be intelligent, critical thinking.

I started a wiki page on Appropedia.org: Washing and drying clothes. That mentions the idea of sometimes using just water.

I normally use cold water to wash, and use just enough to get stuff clean without the chemical perfume smell. Of course, if you've got solar hot water, then you can have a warm wash and be green, but then it's a matter of how that suits your clothes - I suspect that many types of clothes will last longer with cold washing, but not 100% sure of that.

Chris Baskind · 1 year ago

Hey, the Appropedia write-up looks great. I'm with you: I generally wash on cold. But most people opts for warm, so I ran my informal test with that in mnd.

Chriswaterguy · 1 year ago

Actually, your post got me thinking about how solar hot water could reduce environmental impact more than I'd realized, as it won't need nearly as much detergent as cold water. Of course, warm water is better for more delicate clothes, or colored cotton clothes.