an investigation of domestic laundry in europe - habits ... - SIFO

62An investigation into the domestic laundry habits in Europebleaching agents. These types of detergents are the most common to use athigher temperatures, so it makes sense that they are temperature dependent.As already stated, the Dutch compact detergent, NL-A, and the Greek traditionaldetergent, G-B, are dependent on temperature, when comparing tests at30 °C and 40 °C. As we may see from figure 3-3, this is also the case whenwe look at the results for 60 °C. The wash performance at 60 °C is significantlyhigher than the wash performance at 40 °C for both NL-A and G-B.However, the water hardness for these two is different for the 60 °C programme.G-B was tested at 15.4 °dH at 60 °C and 14 °dH at 30 °C and 40 °C.NL-A was tested at 9 °dH at 60 °C and 14 °dH at 30 °C and 40 °C.When comparing the results for the Greek detergent, we see that there is ahigher difference in the wash performance at 30 °C compared to 40 °C than at40 °C compared to 60 °C. This may indicate that the latter difference is due tothe higher water hardness used in the tests at 60 °C. But caution must be usedin drawing conclusions; the reason for this difference might be that this detergentcontains ingredients that become more active between 30 °C and 40 °C,which is why the effect is not as great when we increase the temperature.For the Dutch detergent we see a very high increase in wash performance between40 °C and 60 °C. The difference is higher than between 30 °C and40 °C. This difference is also higher than the difference between the washperformance at 40 °C and 60 °C for the Greek detergent. As the water hardnessis lower for the test at 60 °C for the Dutch detergent, this may indicatethat a synergic effect of these two parameters yields the high increase in washperformance. But it may also be that this detergent contains ingredients thatbecome more active between 40 °C and 60 °C.If we investigate the type D detergent from Greece and the Netherlands, wefind no differences between tests using common laundry processes and testsusing fixed conditions. These detergents are tested using the same wash temperature(40 °C), but with different hardness. This shows that different waterhardness yields no differences in results when operating with the same temperature.NorwayThis study has shown that people in Norway use a relatively high wash temperature,but this does not seem to have an effect on temperature dependencyof the tested detergents. Only the compact detergent with bleaching agents is