Dirty Labs wants to make laundry clean and green

In Arizona, laundry detergent brand Dirty Labs is taking on the likes of massive consumer products companies like Unilever and Procter & Gamble with biobased formulations. The company’s detergents use biobased ingredients such as enzymes that clean clothes by readily break down into harmless molecules once in the environment.According to Fast Company, Americans do about 35 billion loads of laundry each year. 

“Everyone has to do laundry, so the scale is pretty mind-boggling,” says David Watkins, CEO and cofounder of Dirty Labs, tells the popular online publication. “That’s a whole lot of detergent going down the drain. I think that as a consumer, you put your laundry detergent in the washing machine, it washes your clothes, and then it’s gone, and it’s something that’s not very visible to people. But when you start to address the big picture here, all of these chemicals are going into our wastewater system. . . . There is a big accumulation of these things in the environment.”