Laundry detergent pod

Laundry pods were advertised as a way to reduce wasted use of powdered and liquid detergent by having precise measurements for a load.

[5][6] MonoSol is one of the companies that develops the water-soluble film used for laundry and dishwasher detergent packs, used by brands including Tide, with roughly US$250 million in annual sales and controlling around 90-percent of the market.

[7] Notable brands of these packs include All, Arm & Hammer, Gain, Purex, Persil, Rinso and Tide.

In the 1990s, Unilever and Henkel launched a similar laundry detergent pack product sold in Western Europe under the Persil brand.

[8][9] Powder Laundry Soluble Sachets were first marketed in the UK and Europe in 1998 as Soapy Sacks and shortly thereafter rebranded as Aquados and received a Millennium Award for the innovation.

These changes included specifications for safe manufacturing that suggested liquid laundry detergent packet packaging must be easy to close in one motion and meet one or more of the following safety requirements and features:[15] In 2021, an evaluation of 2012-2020 data from the National Poison Data System (NPDS) was conducted to describe the characteristics of exposures to liquid laundry detergent packets in the context of the ASTM changes.

This correlates to the introduction of liquid laundry detergent packets in the U.S. at a time when the ASTM safety standards were still in initial development and implementation.

[19] In 2014, a study published in Pediatrics found that from 2012 to 2013, more than 17,000 calls were made to poison control centers about children who had been exposed to the packs.

[20] Despite the industry's move toward safer packaging, a 2017 study published in JAMA Ophthalmology found that between 2012 and 2015, the number of chemical eye burns associated with laundry detergent pods among 3-to 4-year-old children skyrocketed from fewer than 20 to almost 500 per year; in 2015, these injuries were responsible for 26% of all chemical eye burns among this population.