Groups want EPA to limit PVA in laundry pods, seeing microplastic problems

An environmental coalition and the green home products brand Blueland are asking the Environmental Protection Agency to limit PVA film used in billions of laundry and dishwasher pods each year, saying they contribute to microplastic pollution.

New York-based Blueland, along with the Plastic Pollution Coalition, Beyond Plastics and others, are asking EPA in a Nov. 15 petition to limit polyvinyl alcohol plastic film in the increasingly popular laundry pods format, as well as in other consumer packaging broadly.

The groups also want EPA to remove PVA from the agency's "Safer Choice" program, a public list of materials the agency provides consumers to certify, in the words of the program's website, products that are "safer for human health and the environment."

The environmental coalition points to research — including what it calls a first-of-its-kind study commissioned by Blueland and done by Plastic Oceans International — showing that PVA film does not readily biodegrade after use and that 75 percent of it can escape from city water treatment plants.

That study, which was also written by researchers at Arizona State University, said PVA, which is also called PVOH, is one of the "most ubiquitous pollutants in wastewater" from its use in a variety of industries, including in textiles, paints, meat packaging, glues and pharmaceuticals.

However, the Washington-based American Cleaning Institute, which represents the cleaning products supply chain, said the study does not accurately represent what happens in wastewater treatment plants to process PVA, and it dramatically overestimates the amount used in pods.

ACI said the PVA films used in laundry and detergent packets are not microplastics because they fully dissolve in water and "are fully biodegraded by microorganisms in water treatment facilities and the environment."

"The hypothesis laid out in this single paper that Blueland and some of the other groups rely on really contradicts decades worth of science and ignores some of the product design and test methods used by manufacturers," said Brian Sansoni, ACI senior vice president of communications, outreach and membership.

Yash Parulekar, associate director of stewardship, sustainability and regulatory at PVA maker Monosol LLC, said in an interview arranged by ACI that market reports show much less PVA used in detergent pods than the petition estimates.

"They used a number that is about three times higher than anybody ever pulled out," he said. Monosol is part of Tokyo-based Kuraray Group.

The Plastic Oceans study, however, said PVA gets into the environment as microplastic, where it can collect contaminants like heavy metals and antibiotics that are present in wastewater plants, and then concentrate them in the environment and the food chain.

PVA frequently does not break down adequately enough in water treatment facilities, the study said.

Blueland and the environmental groups want EPA to do more extensive health and safety testing on PVA and remove it from the "Safer Choice" list while the research is ongoing.

"The work has not been done on polyvinyl alcohol to understand its effects on human health and the planet, but it has exhibited bioaccumulation properties," said Blueland CEO Sarah Paiji Yoo. "It's been documented to mobilize things like heavy metals, which is problematic because it's going to be in wastewater."

Other studies have found PVA in drinking water and human breast milk, raising the importance for the EPA review, Yoo said.

"It's used in very large quantities; it's going down on our drains and ending up in our water systems, where 75 percent of it is persisting," she said.

The groups estimate there are 20 billion laundry and dishwasher pods used each year in the U.S.

Blueland makes laundry tablets that do not use PVA film. Instead, its tablets are tightly compressed without a covering film in a manufacturing process that Blueland developed, Yoo said.

The head of the Plastic Pollution Coalition said the study is the first part of a larger campaign.

"The work Blueland has done to get us here, sponsoring this study, is only half the battle," said PPC Managing Director Julia Cohen. "We aim to create big noise with the EPA in order to move them to recognize what we all now know: that PVA must be eliminated from the Safer Choice list.

"We want everyone to understand in simple terms that pods are plastic and PVA is an unknown substance making its way into our waterways and our bodies," Cohen said.

Yoo compared PVA laundry pods to concerns about microbeads, which were banned from cosmetics under a law signed by President Barack Obama in 2015.

"We take a lot of inspiration from the progress that's been made in the past seven years on microbeads," she said. "We feel these pods and these sheets are a very similar threat."

ACI rejects the comparison to microbeads, arguing that microbeads were engineered to be durable and remain in a product, while the materials in laundry pods are designed to break apart in the wash.

"The grades of PVOH engineered for use in home care products like laundry detergent and automatic dishwasher packets possess some of the best solubility for the variety of washing conditions possible," ACI said in a written statement.

Industry officials said they are confident any EPA review will confirm the safety of the pod films.

"We welcome if someone at the EPA wants to look at this because we have been doing this for years and years with regulators, with the Safer Choice program, giving them the necessary data that's understood by scientists," Parulekar said.

ACI said in a Nov. 1 news release that EPA named it a "Partner of the Year" for the Safer Choice program.

ACI said the study used by Blueland and the environmental groups relies on "worst case" biodegradation data for grades of PVA that are not used in laundry pods and does not distinguish other sources of PVA and different formulations, including for nonsoluble grades used in other industries.

Parulekar said the European Union, in its review of intentionally added microplastics, has determined that these uses of PVA are biodegradable because they meet testing standards and are therefore not considered microplastics.

"You look at the European Union and their whole focus on sustainability and microplastics. We have been scrutinized through that lens for the last three years or more, requiring us to submit all kinds of data on the biodegradation profile, on what happens in what environment," he said.

The European Commission, in late August, issued a draft standard for intentionally added microplastics, and some environmental groups said they hoped it would lead to a ban on microplastics used in many applications, including cleaning products.

But Parulekar said he was confident that EPA would agree that the PVA materials in laundry and dishwasher pods are not microplastics.

"You want to highlight this to EPA, why would we have any worries about that," he said. "We have all the data to back it up."

Parulekar also argued that the laundry pods have an environmental benefit: They enable more cold water washes, which saves energy, because they can better package cleaning chemicals.