Enzymes in laundry detergent

Enzymer i vaskemiddel — hvid pulver på træske

You’ve probably seen it on the back of your laundry detergent. Protease. Lipase. Amylase. Cellulase. Enzymes in detergent sound like something out of a chemistry lab. And that’s exactly what they are.

But have you ever stopped and asked: why?

People have washed clothes for thousands of years. With ash. With lye. With soap made from animal fat. And it worked.

The short answer: the dirt didn’t change. Everything else did.

As far back as ancient Egypt, people washed clothes with animal fat and plant ash. The Romans used the same. The principle stayed unchanged for millennia: fat plus ash equals soap. Add hot water, time, and hands… and the clothes came clean.

The most widespread method was called “bucking”… a long soak in lye, meaning water filtered through wood ash. The lye dissolved fat, loosened dirt, and bleached yellowed linen. The process took up to twenty-four hours of soaking and fifteen hours of washing. Brutal. But effective.

Protein stains… blood, sweat, egg… were always the hardest. But hot water and mechanical action handled most of it.

No enzymes. Just soap, heat, and hands.

In 1946, Procter and Gamble launched Tide… the first synthetic detergent. The secret was sodium tripolyphosphate, STPP, a builder that bound calcium and magnesium so the detergent could work in hard water without soap scum.

Tide outcompeted everything by 1949. Synthetic detergents pushed out traditional soap across the United States over the course of the fifties.

But there was a price. The STPP ended up in lakes and rivers. Phosphorus fed algae. The algae choked the waterways. By the sixties, Lake Erie was so polluted that beaches became unusable and the fishing collapsed. Up to seventy percent of the phosphorus in the water came from detergents.

The solution? Ban phosphorus. The United States started in the seventies. The EU followed. Switzerland, Norway, Austria in 1994.

The first enzyme detergent was invented in 1913. The German chemist Otto Röhm put trypsin, an enzyme from pig pancreas, into his product Burnus. The enzyme broke down protein-bound dirt so it released from the fabric.

But it sold terribly. Trypsin was unstable in alkaline detergents.

For fifty years, nothing happened.

Then in 1960, researchers at the Danish company Novo, today Novonesis, discovered by chance an enzyme that was alkaline-stable. They called it Alcalase. In 1963 it launched in the detergent Biotex… the first enzyme detergent that actually worked.

In the sixties, P&G and Unilever added proteases. In the eighties came lipases and amylases. In the nineties the market exploded.

Today the market for enzymes in detergent is an industry worth 2.14 billion dollars in 2024, with expected growth to 3.69 billion dollars in 2034.

Enzymes didn’t become necessary because the dirt got harder. They became necessary because we changed three things at once.

First, we swapped out the fabrics. In the sixties, polyester was new. Today it makes up fifty-nine percent of all fiber production globally… seventy-eight million tons in 2024. Synthetic fibers account for eighty-eight percent of all new fiber.

The problem: polyester is oleophilic. It loves oil. It draws grease stains in and holds on. Cotton releases a grease stain in one wash. Polyester takes two washes with enzyme detergent to reach ninety-five percent removal.

We fill our wardrobes with fabric that actively binds dirt. And then wonder why we need stronger chemistry.

Second, we lowered the temperature. For millennia, hot water was the primary stain remover. About ninety percent of the energy in a wash goes to heating. So the industry pushed cold washing… for the environment, for the energy savings, and because cheap clothing can’t take heat.

In Europe, the average wash temperature fell from fifty-three degrees in 1995 to forty degrees in 2020. Thirteen degrees in twenty-five years. And the trend is accelerating… forty-four percent of European households now wash mainly at thirty degrees, up from thirty-five percent in 2020.

But surfactants are slower in cold water. The chemistry works worse without heat.

The solution: enzymes. Enzymes that compensate for the hot water we no longer use. P&G has said it themselves, directly: they couldn’t claim good cleaning in cold water without improved enzymes.

Third, we produced twice as much clothing… and wore it half as long. Between 2000 and 2015, global clothing production doubled. At the same time, the wear time per item dropped by thirty-six percent. Up to a hundred billion pieces of clothing are produced every year. Ninety-two million tons end up in landfills.

And most of it is polyester. Cheap. Synthetic. Made to be thrown away.

Every piece of cheap polyester clothing releases, in a wash, between six hundred and forty thousand and one and a half million microplastic fibers. Between two hundred thousand and five hundred thousand tons of textile microplastic end up in the oceans every year… thirty-five percent of all primary microplastic pollution in the world’s oceans.

The chain looks like this: We replaced natural fibers with synthetic ones, and so stains became harder to remove. We lowered the wash temperature, and the hot water that did the job disappeared. We produce cheap clothing that can’t take heat, so we can’t just turn it back up. We banned phosphorus in detergents, for good reason, but in doing so lost an effective builder. And the solution became enzymes… a new billion-dollar industry.

Enzymes in detergent solve a problem the industry created itself. Not because dirt is harder than in 1950. But because everything that used to handle the dirt… hot water, natural fibers, simple soap… is gone.

There’s a widespread belief that enzymes cause itching and eczema.

In the late sixties, P&G added proteases to their detergents. Up to fifty percent of the factory workers who handled the enzyme powder developed allergic sensitization… including asthma. The industry responded by encapsulating the enzymes from the eighties on.

But consumers? A review from 2008 went through forty-four studies and concluded that enzymes were not responsible for skin complaints. A large-scale study with fifteen thousand seven hundred and sixty-five participants found only 0.23 percent with an allergic reaction.

The enzymes probably don’t irritate your skin. But that doesn’t mean your detergent is harmless. It’s the other ingredients… surfactants, fragrances, optical brighteners… that are the culprits.

I sell soap. Not detergent. So this isn’t a sales pitch. But here’s what I would do:

Turn the bottle over. Read what it says. Ask yourself: do I need protease, lipase, amylase, and cellulase to wash a cotton t-shirt? Or do I need it because my wardrobe is eighty percent polyester, and I wash at thirty degrees?

The problem isn’t the dirt. The problem is the system.

Buy fewer things made of better materials. Natural fibers release stains more easily than polyester. Hot water still works… forty degrees instead of thirty degrees makes a real difference. Simple soap handles more than you think.

Our great-grandmothers washed with lye and tallow. Without enzymes. Without chemical engineering. And it worked.

It’s not nostalgia. It’s chemistry.

Sources

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