Every year, North American’s alone do over 30 billion loads of laundry! Unfortunately, the standard laundry process involving liquid detergents or powder detergents that come with plastic scoops is very harmful to the environment.

For one, 700 million plastic bottles used to package liquid laundry detergent end in North American landfills every year. Furthermore, liquid detergents contain:

Fortunately, the following brands focus on providing more sustainable choices by designing their products with zero waste in mind – meaning no plastic, no water, and shockingly fewer earth-warming carbon emissions in production and transportation.

Tru Earth is a relatively new company founded in Canada in 2019 that launched with zero-waste and sustainability in mind. It developed its main product, Eco-Strips – ultra-concentrated laundry detergent in the form of eco-friendly pre-perforated strips – to be used in the same way as powder or liquid laundry detergents.

The Eco-Strips packaging is a plastic-free and compostable cardboard sleeve that can double as a shipping envelope after the strips are used up to further cut back on waste. Each pack contains 32 strips, one sheet per load. One 32-load pack is equivalent to one plastic jug. Therefore, one billion plastic jugs could be taken out of circulation if the global population switched to Eco-Strips.

Eco-Strips remove the need for water during production and are ultra-light since they don’t contain water, too. Resultantly, transport-related emissions are reduced by 94% compared to today’s leading-brand detergents! According to company estimates, if the entire world used its laundry strips, the CO2 reduction would equal taking 27 million cars off the road for a day.

As a bonus, the product also takes up considerably less valuable cupboard space! For example, you can fit over 400 loads worth of Eco-Strips in the same space as a 100-load plastic jug of traditional detergent.

Plus, there’s no mess involved thanks to its user-friendly nature: simply throw a sheet in the washer, and you’re good to go; no pouring out liquid or scooping powder involved.

Eco-Strips are hypoallergenic, phosphate-free, paraben-free, and free of chlorine bleach, added dyes, and 1,4-dioxane; thus, making them highly gentle to sensitive skin. In addition, they are vegan; meaning, no testing on animals and no animal-based ingredients.

And Tru Earth is not the only company looking to replace liquid detergent! Frey has also developed water-free, zero-waste vegan detergent sheets so you can do your laundry guilt-free.

The thick plastic containers traditional detergents come in are particularly problematic because everyone has to buy the soap regularly, so the bottles build up in a landfill. That’s why new solutions like the Eco-Strips and Frey sheets are a blessing for the planet. Frey sheets are also dissolvable, functioning in the same way that Eco-Strips do.

How you keep your clothes clean is as important as the act itself. Frey’s laundry detergent sheets are made from a plant-derived biodegradable material. Just toss it in with a load, and it dissolves during the wash, providing the same cleaning power as its unsustainable liquid or powder counterpart.

Frey Co-founder Aidan Porter explained in a press release:

Most liquid laundry detergents come in jugs with a 4:1 ratio of water to soap. This wastes more than just water – it’s unnecessary plastic, shipping emissions, and money right out of consumers’ pockets.

Frey co-founder Leif Frey added:

To combat these issues, we’ve worked with our partners to develop technology to compress materials into a detergent format, completely eliminating the need for water and plastic.

For further incentive, Frey promises to plant a tree for each order you make.

Moving on from washing clothes to washing your body, a new personal-care brand named Plus has developed zero-waste dehydrated body wash sheets, which come in biodegradable packaging that dissolves in the shower.

Like liquid laundry detergent, body wash is composed primarily of water and contained in plastic bottles. Not Plus! It comes as sheets about the size of a credit card, each individually packaged in a sachet made from wood pulp that comes from Forest Stewardship Council-certified forests and printed with water-based dissolvable ink. When wetted, the sheet turns to a dense foam, and the packaging disappears down the drain. The sachets are packaged for transport in a bio-based compostable zippered pouch and mailer.

Plus Co-Founder and CEO Cathryn Woodruff said in a press release:

The idea of 100% dissolvable packaging—that you hop in the shower with something and it disappears by the time you’re done getting clean—was something that we felt has the potential to get people really excited about making a better choice in the shower.

The eco-friendly company says their body wash produces 80% fewer carbon emissions during shipping and uses 38% less water than liquid body wash that comes in plastic bottles. Furthermore, it offsets over 100% of its emissions by supporting reforestation projects through a partnership with the carbon capture project Pachama.

And if all the sustainability perks don’t do it for you, maybe convenience will. Since Plus sheets are self-contained, it’s the ideal no-fuss product when you need to take soap with you on the go; it’s the lightweight solution for going to the gym or traveling.