Biodegradation

Have you ever wondered how your clothing, house, and dishes get clean? The cleansing function of soaps is the beginning.

A soap is a molecule consisting of one part that bonds to water and another part that bonds to fat or grease. Water and fat cannot mix together because they have different surface tensions. Soaps form a bridge between water and fat particles that neutralizes this difference and allows dirt to be removed.

We can explain that a bit more using a practical example:
If you shake a bit of pepper onto a water surface and then add a drop of soap, the molecules will spread out and the pepper will be distributed over the entire surface. If you carefully place a needle on a water surface so it floats and then add a drop of soap, the needle will sink to the bottom. The same principle applies to dirty laundry: the dirt is dissolved and dispersed by the soap.

Current legislation requires 60% of the detergents in a cleansing agent to be fully decomposed wthin a period of twenty eight days. At the end of the process of complete biological decomposition, all that remains is water, CO2 and minerals, which can be taken up again by living natural systems. However, this legal requirement for full degradability only applies to the detergents (which form 3-20% of the total product), and only under conditions where oxygen is present.

Ecover goes further. Ecover uses only raw materials that are also fully degradable in oxygen-poor conditions and ensures that the entire product is fully degradable, with nothing left except minerals. That means all the ingredients are decomposed, not just the soaps, and decomposition occurs under oxygen-rich (aerobic) conditions as well as oxygen-poor (anaerobic) conditions. That is our commitment to allow you to make an environmentally aware choice.