Detergents: history, evolution, advantages and drawbacks

6010 years ago, nothing else and anything less that the Egyptians and the Sumerians invented the soap. From then on, the laundry of clothes advanced very little, until last century the industrial elaboration of synthetic detergents began. The first produced so much foam that a great river as Mississippi transformed into an enormous laundry covered with white bubbles.

Nowadays, most d the present detergents in the market offer a good or very good laundry effectiveness. Also answer has been given to specific necessities with special products for delicate pledges and, deleting the whitening ones, for color clothes. The current tendency, takes to concentrate the product volume to diminish the quantity of wastes and to increase the consumer's comfort. The containers have also evolved from the old drums until the handbags and current bags, reducing your size and improving your handling. The law forces, of course to that appear in the containers you give you as the name and address of the manufacturing company and the net content of the product.

According to that marked by the law, all the detergents have to be biodegradable, but this doesn't mean that they are harmless for the environment. In fact, the washed ones can only reduce a part from your ingredients (the tensioactivos) to elements that can be minimumly digestible for the nature, without damaging it.

In the last decade, the polemic according to the detergents has turned around the detergents with or without phosphates. These substances are helping, they potentialize the work of the driven aerials of the detergent and they contribute to neutralize the effects of the hardness of the water. They are nutritious elements that are also used to manufacture subscriptions and they appear in the composition of many foods.

Your effect in very poor waters in nutrients accelerates the increment of the algae and, when reducing the available oxygen, you cause the death of the fish. This problem is more serious in the north of Europe, for example, the waters are not since so rich in salts in that field.

The debate on the phosphates, you have impelled to some companies to delete them of your products, substituting them for other components: the zeolitas. Nevertheless, the zeolitas is elements created artificially by the chemistry and difficult to delete. Also, as much the zeolitas as the phosphates and other habitual ingredients in the detergents form muds that are also negatives for the waters.