My friend bought one but after using it for several months, she has resorted to putting a little eco-friendly laundry detergent in each load to remove stains and smells. Still, she is now using 75% less laundry detergent than she used to. I would also recommend having a bottle of hydrogen peroxide and some biodegradable soap and water in a spray bottle in the laundry area to apply on stains before you put the clothes in to wash with the Eco Balls.

Not much difference between them, except that even my dodgy old washing machine never manages to leave a blob of the liquid behind, whereas it does sometimes leave a patch of powder still on the clothes when they’re finished.

Refills – there are a few reasons that we don’t do refills in our powder products. We’d need a re-sealable box for people to refill to, which for durability would most likely need to be plastic. This would have a bigger impact on the environment than the cardboard packaging that we currently use. Logistically, keeping powder clean and dry in storage within the shops would be very difficult to achieve, so this makes it unviable too.

Louisa, you also raised the point about delivery footprints – Ocado say that shopping with them is as green as walking to the shop!

But you can find recipes all over the internet. I use an old kitty litter plastic container with a lid, I don’t use borax as I did not find much effect from it. It takes me about 1/2 hour or so about every six weeks to make a batch. It is cheap, cheap, cheap, about $2-3 to fill my container, that is a lot of soap!. I use some soap called Zote, which I can find easily locally, but any soap you can grate will work.

If it’s made of cardboard without a wax or gloss coating, you can tear it up and add it to a copost pile. After all. cardboard is paper and paper used to be a tree. I keep a seperate barrel by my garden shed for cardboard that I add water to. Toss in sand and grass clippings. By the fall you have fantastic “mulch” to use to insulate plants for the winter.