| Lisa Ratner, 37, wanted to get rid of the plastic in her life. "During covid, I was sitting at home," she says. "I remember looking at my bathroom and thinking, 'I'm surrounded by plastic bottles. That's kind of gross.'" One by one, she purged bottles of shampoo, soaps and other plastic personal items. When it came time to replace her detergent, a seemingly perfect solution appeared online: laundry sheets. These thin sheets are the latest iteration of laundry detergent, packing highly concentrated powdered detergent in small, tearable sections priced around $15 to $20 for 30 to 60 loads. "They work great," said Ratner about Earth Breeze detergent sheets, which eliminated the chore of transporting and tossing bulky plastic bottles in her San Francisco apartment. "I introduced it to a lot of my friends." What's in laundry sheets? She didn't know one of the top ingredients in the sheets is polyvinyl alcohol, a plastic known as PVA or PVOH. "My assumption was dehydrated soap," she says, "and I didn't look much further than that." Polyvinyl alcohol has been around for decades. Every day, millions of households use PVA to get their laundry and dishes clean. Properly formulated, the plastic can dissolve as easily as sugar or salt in water, before disappearing down the drain. PVA's main selling point, especially in laundry sheets, is its ability to then biodegrade under the right conditions. Is it safe? The Environmental Protection Agency and the Food and Drug Administration have deemed the material reasonably safe. It's been a mainstay on the EPA's Safer Choice and Safer Chemical Ingredient list for years. But does it really biodegrade? PVA can theoretically be broken down by microbes into its molecular components, ultimately leaving mostly water and carbon dioxide. But most studies have been done in the lab. Conditions for PVA biodegradation may not always be present in municipal waste-treatment plants. A peer-reviewed study, funded by Blueland, a company that sells a plastic-free laundry detergent tablet, modeled how PVA would behave under actual conditions at wastewater treatment and disposal facilities. The researchers found nearly 80 percent of the PVA in the wastewater stream, equivalent to 8,000 tons of plastic annually, may not biodegrade. Two other peer-reviewed studies have detected PVA in drinking water and human breast milk. What are brands claiming? Manufacturers are marketing the sheets' multiple environmental bona fides, including avoiding plastic waste and packaging. But others, such as the firm Tru Earth, claim their product is "plastic free." The company removed this language from its website after the Post inquired for comment. It did not respond to the Post's queries. Should I ditch the sheets? There's a new option that's as convenient as sheets or pods — but that contains no plastic. Read the full column below to learn more. | 
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