Laundry Done Right

00:00:15
Speaker 1: Pushkin.

00:00:22
Speaker 2: We all here, so there's thirty five people here now thirty six so we're getting close.

00:00:30
Speaker 1: Okay, thank you. Every Wednesday afternoon, Pushkin Industries, the company that brings you this and many other audio delights, has a staff meeting. Not long ago, I asked if I could take over the meeting for a frank discussion of a very delicate subject, laundry.

00:00:53
Speaker 3: Now.

00:00:53
Speaker 1: I know there's been a lot of chatter around this podcast episode of mine, and there's two questions I keep hearing. One is is there a right answer? And the answer is, of course, is the right answer. There's always the right answer. With Revision's history on zoom, I can see all these faces looking at me, wondering where on earth am I going with this? Is there going to be laundry shaming? And the answer is yes, but the person being shamed is me. The whole reason I'm doing this episode is I became aware that my laundry practices were sorely deficient, and I wanted to understand why. I'm going to pick on a couple of people who were generous enough to share their detergent preferences with me, and I'm going to ask them a few short questions. John Schnarz, Maybe we should start with you, John John Schnarz, Pushkin's vice president of business development, sensitive, highly evolved, modern male, father to many small children. Do you have a top loading or front loading washing machine?

00:01:56
Speaker 4: Top?

00:01:57
Speaker 1: Oh? Interesting? Do you have the piston that comes up? I thought it was what is called a agitator. I believe by this point in my research, I knew a lot about washing machines and top loading machines are well, they're not good. I was embarrassed for John, a senior officer of Pushkin, should know better. Let's skip to Carrie.

00:02:25
Speaker 4: Thank you.

00:02:27
Speaker 1: Carrie Colon, one of our top people making audiobooks Whip Smart. If anyone could teach us something, it would be Carrie. Also, she's a mom, does a lot of laundry. What's your temperature use? Do you very temperature?

00:02:41
Speaker 5: I vary temperature based on instructions?

00:02:44
Speaker 1: What are these? So tell me those those particular protocols.

00:02:47
Speaker 6: Well, actually I should know. I'll back up.

00:02:50
Speaker 5: I go on normal wash, and so my washer will tell me. If I just say normal, it does its boooooop and.

00:02:57
Speaker 6: Then it comes out with whatever.

00:03:00
Speaker 1: The machine.

00:03:01
Speaker 5: I defer to the machine unless there's something that I think I'm supposed to pay special attention to in there.

00:03:07
Speaker 1: Yes, okay, thank you, it's been very helpful. What was I thinking looking back? I don't know. I didn't really explain myself. I just crashed the staff meeting to ask people about their laundry habits in the hopes that the senior Pushkin leadership would teach the younger people on our team something about how to conduct themselves in the world. What it means to be mindful, purposeful, environmentally conscious, to lead with empathy, to lean in. And when I didn't hear that, I felt betrayed. I want to check in with Brendan. You out there? Yeah, you are a eCos nice Brendan Francis Newnham, another of our top people. If you google the words Brooklyn natural wine, farmers market, vinyl records, and whatever other affiliated terms show up automatically in the search field, you get Brendan eco h an eccentric choice, Uh, first of all, top loader, front loader, laundromat nice, Oh oh oh, old school? Thank you? Yeah?

00:04:21
Speaker 3: Uh?

00:04:22
Speaker 1: And uh do you separate? I do?

00:04:25
Speaker 3: Yeah?

00:04:25
Speaker 1: And what's your system for separation here?

00:04:29
Speaker 7: I do darts and lights?

00:04:31
Speaker 1: Yeah? Do you wash the other different protocols.

00:04:34
Speaker 6: Yes, I do my my whites, I do hot water, and then my darks I do warm water.

00:04:42
Speaker 1: You do your whites in hot water. Yeah, okay, good, that's all. I also add bleach into my whites with ghosts. No, no, no, that's all. I've heard enough.

00:04:53
Speaker 2: Here.

00:04:54
Speaker 1: I thought that Pushkin was in laundry terms the shining laundry mat on the hill, and it's not.

00:05:03
Speaker 3: But that's okay.

00:05:05
Speaker 1: Actually it wasn't okay. My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. This episode is about an odyssey I embarked upon in the darkest days of the pandemic, an odyssey which ended in me shaking my head at my fellow Pushkinites over their laundry room conduct, even though I knew deep down that I was no better than they were. Where do you go when you've become consumed with questions of clothes and laundry and detergent The answer is obvious. You go to the north side of Cincinnati, about a fifteen minute drive from downtown, to an industrial zone with a cluster of nineteenth century Granite Buildings, the Proctor and Gamble Fabric and Home Care Innovation Center, the research arm of Procter and Gamble, the consumer products Giant, which makes basically every thing in your broom closet, your laundry room, and your medicine cabinet. I went there on snowy winter's day to meet a guy named Todd Kleine. You look chemist by trade.

00:06:24
Speaker 7: So I studied chemical engineering. So close to a chemist.

00:06:28
Speaker 1: Yeah, Todd is maybe my age. Kind of intense wiring runners build. He and I actually ran eight miles a night before through downtown Cincinnati, over the bridges along the riverfront up through Grant Park, which I realized later is a very Todd Cline thing to do. Put the visitor through his paces. And have you been at P ANDNG your whole lot? O?

00:06:51
Speaker 7: I have been, and it feels like my whole life because I've been here twenty five plus years now. So I started on metamusol, which at that time was positioned as a supplement for laxative. So I was, you know, the twenty two year old single guy the school and they said, you're working on metamucil. Doing what? And it is still one of my favorite things I've ever worked on.

00:07:16
Speaker 1: Klein worked on re engineering the formulation to make it more palatable. Then he was assigned to the painkiller A Lap, then Folger's Coffee back when Procter still own those brands, A Procter they like to move people around. And after that he was posted to Swiffer.

00:07:34
Speaker 7: So my team was doing Swiffer wet Jet, which I don't know if you've seen those. It's a mop that you push a button, solution sprays out, and there's a pad that collects all the dirty solutions. So you've got the mop part, then you've got a separate solution on putting out something that will both help dissolve soils, break up soils, but not leave streaks on the floor, and also leave a nice scent.

00:08:02
Speaker 1: There are a few greater pleasures in life than discovering that something once considered uninteresting is actually InCred interesting.

00:08:12
Speaker 7: You're trying to get those scrubbing on hard things, suck up solution and then hold it there because you're sucking up dirty solution and you don't want it going back down on the floor. So we actually use the same polymer inside the pad that we use in diapers to hold the urine with mops. A lot of times when you're mopping floors, you're slashing dirty water around a lot, and with swiffer you actually suck it up and it holds it there.

00:08:40
Speaker 1: Madameusel A, leave Folger's swiffer the Maslow's hierarchy of consumer products. I will warn you about halfway through this episode, you'll say to yourself, Wow, Malcolm really fell hard for those Procter and Gamble people, didn't he. Let me just address that issue now before things get out of hand. Yes, I did. I was raised in a household in the nineteen seventies where my father used a handsaw to cut all the wood for our woodstove because he refused to use a chainsaw. I think he considered chainsaws decadent. My mother, meanwhile, in the dead of winter, would bundle up in a parka like an Eskimo and hang the family's laundry outside on a clothesline because she disapproved of dryers. These are my people, my heritage, people who dwelt on the particulars of their domestic conduct. At some point in the midst of the COVID lockdown, I reflected on my own domestic practice what do I do. I go down to my basement and I throw my clothes heedlessly into my shiny red LG washing machine, grab whatever detergent I can from a row of random bottles on the shelf, mindless consumption of huge amounts of hot water, chemicals and electricity, without so much as a stray thought to my intentions. We like to think it doesn't matter these little things, but there are twenty five billion loads of laundry done every year in the United States and Canada. That's twenty five billion. The little things add up. So there in my basement on laundry day one evening, I resolved to do better, and off I went, in a blinding snowstorm to Cincinnati to see Todd Klein, P and G's North American Fabricare Section head for Research and Development. In Hindi, there is a word for an opportunity or occasion of seeing a holy person, darshan. I requested a darshan with the Guru of American Laundry. We began our tour in a long room full of washing machines what looked like at least one hundred of them, front loaders, top lofeors, big industrial strength Maytag machines Japanese washing machines, which I'd never seen before, and which are so wonderfully and perfectly Japanese that I felt like grabbing my laundry and jumping on a plane to Tokyo. Figures the Japanese machine would be like more complex, very cool. Yeah, it looks like a let's say, looks like a flight of the moon. Each of the one hundred plus machines in that long room was linked to a network of black pipes, which allowed the Procter people to mimic the typical temperature, water hardness, chlorine concentration of every major water system where Procter and Gamble detergents are sold. You want to simulate how a tide pob washes whites in Raykivic in a late model LG front loader, they can do that. How many people work in just in this facility in R and D for detergents.

00:12:02
Speaker 7: Oh wow, at least a couple of hundred.

00:12:07
Speaker 1: All those people for the past decade or more or had been focused on the question of how we could do our twenty five billion loads of laundry in a more environmentally friendly way. They begin with a comprehensive statistical analysis of the carbon footprint of every input in the laundry process. Raw materials in the detergents, do they have a big carbon footprint? Actually not really. Manufacturing every tide plant now runs on wind power, transportation and packaging pretty insignificant, particularly if you're talking pods in a recyclable tub, which are highly concentrated and easy to ship. The environmental impact of a load of laundry turns out to be driven by what we the people at home do. Blind showed me a chart with all the calculations.

00:12:58
Speaker 7: And when you look at the carbon footprint, you can see that the product use phase is by far it's everything.

00:13:07
Speaker 1: Product use is industry jargon for your laundry ritual. So it's what percent is that two thirds? Two thirds?

00:13:14
Speaker 7: Yeah, it's close to seventy percent. And what that is is the energy to heat the water when people do laundry. If someone chooses to use cold instead of warm, it's a seventy percent reduction in energy in the use phase. So you have a huge shrinking here. If they choose cold versus hot, it's a ninety percent reduction in energy.

00:13:38
Speaker 1: Cold water washing is the holy grail of the laundry business. Washing your clothes in cold water means colors don't run, your clothes lasts longer, you save a lot of money, and you shrink your carbon footprint massively. But it's a lot harder to get your clothes clean in cold water. The chemical reactions between detergent and stain slow down dramatically as the temperature drops. This is what the detergent experts at the Innovation Center do. They try to solve this problem.

00:14:08
Speaker 7: So factants. We use a blend of surfactants. What is a surfactant. They're really the workhourse of the detergency and they're a material that goes in and it basically helps roll the stains off of the clothing. So they penetrate into the clothing and under and lift up and capture the stain, almost encapsulate it and help bring it out into the water.

00:14:32
Speaker 1: Then there are enzymes to break down the stain into smaller pieces.

00:14:36
Speaker 7: So we have specific enzymes for protease that goes after protein based stains, amylase goes after starch based stains, manninase goes after more gelatin manotype stains, And we develop enzymes that are formulated specifically for cold water.

00:14:56
Speaker 1: He went on, he talked about special antioxidants, something called keelants, the challenge of removing body odor from t shirts. Cline made the point over and over that the only way for a detergent to be in vironmentally friendly was if it's effective in cold water, and the only way it could be effective in cold water is if it's designed to the most exacting specifications.

00:15:20
Speaker 7: When you're washing your clothes, surfactants and polymers and enzymes are there to get the soil off of your clothes, but when they come off, your clothes are swashing around in this water, so you pull everything off, and then your clothes.

00:15:37
Speaker 1: Are circuitting in the dirty wall.

00:15:39
Speaker 7: Exactly, so the other polymer we use is there to prevent the dirt from redepositing back onto your clothes.

00:15:47
Speaker 1: The most environmentally sustainable detergent is, by definition, the most sophisticated detergent. You can't limit your carbon footprint without putting an army of engineers and bench scientists on the job, But just spend a few minutes online reading detergent rankings on environmental websites. The importance of water temper almost never comes up. Instead, it's all about simplicity. I mean, just listen to this, picked at random from the Mountain of laundry advice on the Internet. The eight best green laundry detergents of twenty twenty one from something called the Spruce Ready best budget eCos liquid laundry detergent, the kind that Brendan uses, remember him, Brooklyn Brandon. eCos boasts that their liquid detergent is made from plant based ingredients, as if they're telling us it's safe enough to drink. Meanwhile, the site earthfriendlytips dot com writes glowingly of something called Molly's SuDS.

00:16:56
Speaker 8: Mollie SuDS is one of the best eco friendly laundry detergents because it was developed to be Earth safe and people safe. It contains no chemical based sutsing ingredients. Instead, it's formula I did with only five earth derived ingredients.

00:17:13
Speaker 1: Only five earth derived ingredients. What does that even mean? Even the name makes no sense. Molly's SuDS. As it happens, SuDS are the problem in laundry.

00:17:25
Speaker 7: High efficiency machines have sensors that at the end of the rent cycle, since are there any SuDS left or not? And if there are, they'll do an extra rent cycle, so you'll use extra water.

00:17:36
Speaker 1: If you're a detergent company that wants to be seen as green, you don't call out SuDS in your name. You boast about all the sophisticated engineering advances you've made to suppress your SuDS. The biggest question the environmentally conscious consumers should be asking is which detergent will allow me to do as many as possible of my laundry loads in cold water. Tardkline has devoted years of his life to answering that question.

00:18:06
Speaker 7: We do a lot of technical testing maybe instead. Up over here, He.

00:18:10
Speaker 1: Led me over to a counter where he had a series of Haines t shirts in both one hundred percent cotton and cotton poly blend. On each shirt there was a grid of little circular stains. And where you've got nes cafe coffee, grape juice and blueberries, and then gravy blood and us clay and then barbecue Hershey's what's that? What's GCS chocolate? Just chocolate and French is mustard. So we have a grid of nine stains of nine stains.

00:18:42
Speaker 7: Yeap, and here's rice starch and soy milk, as well as these two that say see them those are body soils, so we will use stain sets like this. They're technical stains, so they're designed not to be fully removed when we do it, and we use spectro photometry to measure what percent of each stain is removed. But what you can see here is this is tied on cold. Relative to the competitor.

00:19:10
Speaker 1: The tiding question was tied Hygienic Clean pods. The competitor was one of the other best selling detergents on the market. Climb wouldn't tell me what it was. The competitor washed the stain grid on warm. The Tide Hygienic Clean washed the stained grid on cold. He held up the results.

00:19:30
Speaker 7: You can see particularly with particularly with the gravy blood.

00:19:34
Speaker 1: Gravy blood barbecue and Hershey's tied totally wins. It looks like it's even on blueberries clay and French's mustard.

00:19:46
Speaker 7: It's closer on mustard. They actually it's either a tie or they may actually win. On the mustard. It's a pH driven stain. The rest of them, when you look at the statistics and the spectrum for tarmater results, we actually have significant winds there as well.

00:20:09
Speaker 1: The laundry wizards have given us away to save money, save our clothes, and save the environment. But is that what we do? No, we do not. In America, less than half of all laundry loads are cold water. When it comes to our laundry, we are a nation divided. And who is in the hot and warm half, the dumb half, the laundry basket of deplorables. Malcolm Gladwell, who likes to wag his finger at other people over their ethical lapses and fancies himself the paragon of science based, open minded rationality, physician, heal thyself. When I got back from Cincinnati, I called up my old friend Dide Gordon. We ride again, We.

00:21:06
Speaker 6: Ride again as always.

00:21:09
Speaker 1: Some of you may remember Dede. She appeared in the Revisionist History episode Free Brown Williams from season three. I've known her forever. When I first met her, she lived in a fabulous mid century house right by the Hollywood Sign in Beachwrick Canyon. I used to house sit there whenever de Dy went off on her annual trips to Japan. I got to take care of her dog's sage, I miss Sage. D d now runs a boutique consumer research outfit called the Gordon company. You go to Dede when your brand has a problem and you've run out of answers. I think Dede's a genius. Just to be clear, the reason we're doing this is that I was astonished and ashamed to learn that I had been washing my clothes on warm and hot all these years, when I could have had better results for on every dimension if i'd washed them on cold. And so I wanted to understand not just why I I went wrong, but I want to understand who are these people who I should be emulating, who saw the truth before I did?

00:22:16
Speaker 6: You always start your conversations that way. I'm obsessed.

00:22:20
Speaker 3: I need to understand what is it about these cold water people that I'm not getting?

00:22:26
Speaker 6: Why am I not like these people? Tell me? You need to tell me.

00:22:30
Speaker 1: So I was disturbed.

00:22:31
Speaker 6: It was like, okay, I was disturbed, so disturbed. Now you were you were disturbed.

00:22:38
Speaker 1: I'd given Didi a job the kind her company does all the time, consumer interviews and analysis. I asked her to find me some dedicated cold water laundry people, figure them out, report back. Diddy's team did hours and hours of interviews with scores of people, and now I was getting the report.

00:22:58
Speaker 4: And we asked them all different types of questions about their attitudes and beliefs around laundry and detergent and brands and their process. We asked them about, you know, what makes them tick. And we also watched some of them do their laundry and they walked us through their process of doing laundry, and then we had a post interview with them as well.

00:23:22
Speaker 6: It was really interesting, really interesting. I mean, these people that we talked to really love doing laundry. I mean they love it.

00:23:31
Speaker 1: There was one interviewee in particular that did he wanted me to listen to. I'll call her Janet.

00:23:37
Speaker 6: She's a laundry master.

00:23:40
Speaker 3: She hires a nanny to watch her kids so that she can go do the laundry.

00:23:47
Speaker 1: That's fantastic, okay, I mean, like, let's get real here.

00:23:53
Speaker 6: I mean that's some serious laundry love.

00:23:57
Speaker 1: Janet was maybe in her forties or early fifties, single mom of three, successful entrepreneur. God knows how did he found her. She played me tape of Janet talking with one of the Gordon Company analysts.

00:24:08
Speaker 4: Tom.

00:24:10
Speaker 9: Let's see, one of your best friends was going to describe you to me? Who doesn't know you at all, How would they describe your personality and sort of what your friends and interests are.

00:24:23
Speaker 2: Okay, so I've been called an angel and a heart of gold. I will help pretty much anyone who needs help. I would also think they would say energetic, all over the place, world traveler, pre pandemic, and just a very nice person and a good mom with good values.

00:24:47
Speaker 9: Very nice, very nice.

00:24:49
Speaker 2: And then some would say, yeah, she's a little crazy.

00:24:55
Speaker 1: Jenet talks about the television shows she watches, the car she drives, how much she loves to garden. Then we get to the good stuff.

00:25:05
Speaker 2: I'm a little neurotic about the laundry. I'm not neurotic about too many things, but when it comes to laundry, I like to buy good things. I dressed my children from the time they were tiny, and you know, beautiful things. I would never use like a bargain brand of detergent, for sure, there's a difference. I would send sometimes the girls to the supermarket and a number of times they bought the store brand, and I tried it and wasn't really garbage.

00:25:42
Speaker 1: Janet's the kind of consumer that did he lives for.

00:25:46
Speaker 6: I just loved her.

00:25:47
Speaker 3: I loved that the attention to detail there was just so every every word there was just you know, so much.

00:25:54
Speaker 6: She just delivered so much.

00:25:56
Speaker 1: But the truth is all the cold water users were like that. All the people did he interviewed detail oriented and driven.

00:26:04
Speaker 6: These people were disciplined.

00:26:06
Speaker 3: So like when we ask them about their washing machine, they could rattle off the year they purchased it, the cubic foot capacity, the number of settings, all of that without ever having to look at anything.

00:26:17
Speaker 6: There was like no manuals sitting on the side there. They were just able to rattle all of that off. Really impressive. No, I know they're they're superhuman.

00:26:26
Speaker 3: It's really what the cold water users are superhumans.

00:26:30
Speaker 1: D Why is it a question if we're interviewing someone to work at Pushkin or the Gordon, why aren't we asking the question how do you do your laundry? And if they say I've been doing cold water for five years, why don't we just say, well, we don't need to ask any anything else.

00:26:45
Speaker 3: I mean, honestly, it's got Honestly, it's got to be part of the vetting from now on, Like this is a vetting question across the board. I mean, they should be doing the same thing with our politicians, like, I want to know if these people are washing in cold water. I bet you Kamala Harris is a cold water user.

00:27:00
Speaker 6: You better believe she's a cold water user.

00:27:04
Speaker 1: Wait to stick about that. She probably know, she probably is. I'm serious actually, because I'm serious too. She's half Indian, half Jamaican. Those are two cold water laundry cultures, right. You know, when my mom was grown up in Jamaica, they weren't. They weren't washing their clothes and hot water washing cold water. So they start with the presumption of cold In what other area of life can you level up so easily? I could just set the default settings on my washer to cold and get to be a better version of myself like Kamala or Janet focused, passionate Janet.

00:27:42
Speaker 2: I'm going to say a year or two ago, I was reading an article about you know, what you can do for the planet and saving energy and bringing down your bills and stuff like that, and they talked about cold water washing, and I said, well, that's like the simplest change I can make.

00:28:00
Speaker 1: At the end of my day in Cincinnati, I met up with Amy Crabile, Brand, vice president at Procter and Gamble for North American laundry. We talked about laundry, but very quickly our conversation turned to dishwashing. Laundry's domestic cousin. Somewhere at Procter and Gamble, there is a parallel universe of dishes and dishpowders and rooms full of dishwashing machines undergoing the same scrutiny given to our laundry.

00:28:30
Speaker 10: Our friends over at Cascade found that people think that it wastes water and energy when you run your dishwasher, and so they'll wait to run a load because they think it's wasteful. But actually, as long as you have eight dishes, running the dishwasher every night uses less energy and water resources than running the sink for two minutes, which I know I would do.

00:28:55
Speaker 1: Normally running run it by again, as long as you have eight do you say eight dishes? Yes, using it the dishwasher takes less energy and less water than running the sink.

00:29:05
Speaker 10: Think for two minutes.

00:29:08
Speaker 1: Yet another entry on the list of things I didn't bother to care about. Two minutes. Yes, really, yes, that is super interesting.

00:29:17
Speaker 10: Yes, and counterintuitive because you would think a big machine has a lot of energy and water. But you know many of these manufacturers are also making those dishwashers more energy efficient too.

00:29:30
Speaker 1: Can you settle for me the angel question of whether you have to rinse your dishes free within the dishwasher? Do you know this is to be the central issue, because you can spend as much water on the pre rints as you do on the actual washing.

00:29:45
Speaker 10: Now settled, you do not need to rinse your dishes before you put them in the dishwasher if you use Cascade.

00:29:52
Speaker 1: Cascade the product of many, many millions of dollars of cutting edge research designed to remove tomato, sauce and butter and gravy from your plates, not some budget eco brand with three ingredients that does such a lousy job you end up running the dishwater shirt twice, or giving up on the dishwasher entirely and freelancing with hot water on max while the planner burns up outside. Really, really, that's huge. That changes everything, changed life. The Visious History's brought to you by Procter and Gamble. No, I'm kidding. Procter and Gamble did not pay for this episode. I fell for him all by myself. The Visious History is produced by me LaBelle Leeman Gesteu and Jacob Smith with Elouise Linton and on a Nyme. Our editor is Julia Barton. Original scoring by Luis Kara, mastering by Flon Williams and engineering by Martine Gonzalez. Fact checking by Amy Gaines. Special thanks to the Pushkin crew. Had a fine Carly Migliori, Maya Cane, Danielle Lacan, Maggie Taylor, Eric Sandler, Nicole Morano, Jason Gambrel and of course Jacob Eisberg. I'm Malcolm Glama. If you love this show and others from Pushkin Industries, consider becoming a Pushnick. Pushnick is a podcast subscription that offers bonus content and uninterrupted listening for four dollars and ninety nine cents a month. Look for Pushnick exclusively on Apple Podcasts subscriptions. Monday is laundry day in the gravel household. As we speak, clothes are circulating in cold water and hygienic clean pods.

00:31:56
Speaker 3: As we speak, we already know Kamala is using it.

00:31:59
Speaker 6: No doubt.

00:32:00
Speaker 3: We are convinced that Kamala Harris is using tie coldwater.

00:32:04
Speaker 1: I know she is.

00:32:05
Speaker 2: I know she is