Laundry balls, put to the test

This weekend I borrowed one of those laundryballs to test out, they’re the ones you sometimes see advertised on tv in infomercials. They claim to get your clothes clean without the need for laundry powder, with one ball being reuseable for 3 years. This sounds great for environmentalists – no laundry powder means no phosphates in the water (making it safer for greywater use, or just as runoff into the system), no manufacturing and transport of laundry powder all over the country, and it’s not tested on animals.

So I chucked this plastic ball in with a load of my laundry, and a load of Dave’s laundry. Our clothes came out perfectly clean. We have office jobs that don’t require us to work up a sweat though, and cricket season is over so I didn’t have any sweaty, grass-stained clothes to test with. The manufacturer recommends that any stained clothes be treated with a pre-wash stain remover, since the laundry-ball is more effective with lightly used clothes.

The ball has ceramic beads inside it, which are meant to create negative ions in the water, and convert it to oxygen and hydroxide using the power of it’s far-infrared rays. This all sounded very science-fiction-y to me, so I looked it up. And that’s when I discovered that this product is a scam. The science claims aren’t exactly untrue, they’re just very misleading. For example:

• Negative ions weaken the surface adhesion to make the dirt separate from the clothes: the product does release negative ions, but in such small quantities as to make it doubtful it’s got any effect at all on your washing.
• Far-infrared rays break up the water and activate them to move faster: well, apparently all materials emit far-infrared rays. Your cutlery, your morning coffee, your mobile phone – all emitting far-infrared rays at about the same rate as a laundry-ball. If you wouldn’t chuck them in your washing machine, there’s no reason to put the laundryball in either.

There doesn’t seem to be anything special about the ceramic beads. I’ve got a ceramic baking tray, and if ceramic was such a powerful cleanser then I’d never have spent so long scrubbing to get the food off it!

No wonder they recommend that any stains be treated with a pre-wash stain remover – this product doesn’t actually do anything! My clothes got cleaner because I washed them in water (which is a pretty powerful solvent in it’s own right). Maybe there was some laundry powder residue left over from the last wash I did, to help it along.

So yes, a laundry ball can help the environment. By giving you a reason to leave out the laundry powder, your greywater will be safer, and you’ll have reduced the consumer demand for washing detergents. But you could get exactly the same result without spending over $50 on a laundry ball, and just using plain water.

There’s plenty of products like this out there, all with different brand-names and slightly different claims. But I won’t be wasting my money on any of them – they are greenwashed. I’ll be sticking to my low-phosphate, grey-water safe, laundry powder from now on.

If you’re interested in following-up on the science or other people’s tests of laundry balls, here’s a few places to get you started:

• Wikipedia’s entry on laundry balls
• Buy Organic’s test
• Bean Sprouts’ test
• Lighter Footsteps’ Greenwash Alert
• Choice Magazine’s 2006 Shonky Awards gives a Shonky to a similar product