Home, sweet home: An exhibition of detergents, dangers, delights and delusions

Few people today lead home-centred lives, and perhaps that’s how it should be. For earlier generations the home was all important: it was a place of comfort after a hard day’s work, a place to be proud of, a place of love and security for young children—and possibly a place of drudgery, boredom, quarrels and abuse. But whatever a home was, it was a place which chemistry was to transform, so that today it is cleaner, healthier, safer to live in, and with some remarkable labour-saving gadgets and entertainment facilities. It is cleaner because of detergents, healthier because of disinfectants and safer because the chemicals we use may be protected by other chemicals, as we shall see. Throughout the 19605, 708 and 8os the use of detergents was portrayed by some as almost wanton pollution of rivers and lakes. The chemicals that lift grease and dirt from dishes, clothes and even our own bodies were accused of causing ‘eutrophication’: the imbalance in rivers, lakes or inland seas that produces an excess of slimy algae or weeds. The main culprit was said to be phosphate in detergents, but even the surfactants they relied on for their cleaning ability were under a cloud, because these were produced from oil. Such was the odium under which detergents laboured that companies strove to produce ‘green’ alternatives that were phosphate-free. Unfortunately many consumers did not like them, but their rejection in the end hardly mattered because it turned out that phosphates were not so environmentally damaging after all. Detergents are made up of many components, but two are worth a closer look: surfactants, which dissolve grease, and phosphates, which soften the water. It is not difficult to find something good to say about them both of them. During the Gulf War of 1991, millions of barrels of crude oil were deliberately released by the Iraqi invaders into the waters of the Persian Gulf. As usually happens, it was the local birds who bore the brunt of this ecological vandalism.