Good old Unilever has decided to do its bit for the environment and invented a new washing powder called Omo Klein en Krachtig – small and powerful.

What makes this washing powder so green, says Unilever, is that you don’t need to use as much of it as ‘normal’ washing powder because it is ‘super-concentrated’. Not 75 millilitres but just 35 millilitres will do the trick.
‘We are going to teach people that one capful is enough,’ Benelux marketing director Robbert de Vreede told news agency ANP.
Apparently the number of loads of washing done a week by the average Dutch household has gone up from one in the 1950s to six today.
At the same time clothes are dumped in the wash every time we take a shower so are hardly dirty anyway, sociology professor Gerda Casimir told the agency. In fact, Dutch households apparently wash clothes more often than any other country in Europe.
Unilever, however, is not preparing to lecture the public about that waste of water, energy and washing powder because that would be too paternalistic, ANP says.
Instead it wants to concentrate on getting less washing powder into the environment. This may indeed be a laudable aim but is there really anyone out there who measures their washing powder out quite so carefully?