You may find yourself constantly putting clothes and sheets in the wash because, put simply, people are dirty. We sweat, shed skin cells and come into contact with food, dirt and many more particles every day. Nothing beats the feeling of putting on a clean T-shirt, especially after a shower. It leaves you feeling fresh and ready to take on the day. The laundry, that household chore that never seems to go off of your to-do list
Consequently, we need a way to effectively get clothes and fabrics clean to maintain personal hygiene and keep up the appearance of garments. Gone are the days when overworked people spent an entire grueling day each week doing laundry, which often included trying to get stubborn stains out of a garment by rubbing it repeatedly across a metal washboard or using a stiff brush to scrape the dirt from the fabric. Today’s laundry detergents, available in both powder and liquid forms, contain a combination of dirt-lifting ingredients that, together with the washing machine’s action, do most of the work of getting clothes clean.
Laundry detergent generally consists of bleaching compounds, surfactants, detergent builders, brighteners, enzymes and other ingredients.
Bleaching Compounds
Today’s detergents also contain chemicals that help to break up more stubborn dirt and stains while killing harmful bacteria in the process. These bleaching agents remove substances in a fabric’s fibers that cause it to turn yellow over time.
Surfactants
A surfactant enables a laundry detergent solution to clean fabric by completely wetting the material being washed and loosening and removing the dirt that is embedded in its fibers. Surfactant molecules help to dissolve grease, oil, protein and carbohydrate-based soil by surrounding the stains, suspending them in the water and dispersing them.
Detergent Builders
Although surfactants are at the heart of laundry detergent’s ability to clean fabrics, other ingredients can help detergents clean better, brighten clothes or smell better. As described previously, some types of surfactants typically do not work well in hard water due to the excess positive ions present. Additives called builders can help detergents to work better under hard water conditions.
The most common detergent builder is sodium tripolyphosphate, or STPP, which removes calcium and magnesium from the water, allowing for more efficient dispersal of fatty or protein-based stains and protecting washing machine parts against corrosion. Detergent builders accomplish this feat by removing calcium (Ca2+) and magnesium (Mg2+) ions in hard water by binding to them. This allows the surfactants, especially anionic surfactants, to bind to more grime, rather than the positively charged ions in the wash water.
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