Most laundry and dishwasher pods are wrapped in a dissolvable film called PVA. It vanishes from view in the drum, which is not the same as vanishing. Melamine foam sponges, the white ones sold as erasers, wear away as you scrub: lab work published in Environmental Science and Technology in 2024 (Su, Xing, Ji et al.) measured around 6.5 million microplastic fibres released for every gram worn off. Denser sponges shed less, and that figure belongs to melamine erasers rather than every sponge in the drawer.

Then there is the chemistry you cannot read. The word fragrance on a cleaning label can legally stand in for dozens of undisclosed ingredients, and fragrance blends often carry phthalates so the scent lasts longer. National biomonitoring has detected phthalate breakdown products in the urine of most people tested (CDC NHANES, via the US EPA Report on the Environment). Detection means a lab could measure it, not that anyone is ill, and no single product is the cause.

Two things usually go wrong. The first is performance. A gentler product goes on a genuinely dirty load, the result is not good enough, and the old bottle is back in the cupboard the same week. That is where most low-tox brands lose people, and good intentions do not make up for a shirt that came out marked.

The second is a promise the swap cannot keep. University of Plymouth researchers found that a single six kilogram wash of synthetic fabric can release over 700,000 plastic microfibres (Napper and Thompson, Marine Pollution Bulletin, 2016). Those fibres come from the clothes, not the detergent, so changing detergent does not change them. Sold on the wrong promise, a swap gets abandoned as soon as you work that out.

The laundry and dishwasher tablets run on enzymes (protease, amylase, lipase and cellulase) with oxygen bleach from sodium percarbonate, plus TAED so that oxygen still activates in a cool wash. One tablet goes straight into the drum on any cycle, cold included. The dishwasher takes one in the dispenser with no pre-rinsing.

The dish and hand soaps arrive as powder you mix into the glass bottle, so you are not paying to ship water and the soap is made up fresh. The standard we hold the set to is that it cleans like the supermarket bottles it replaces, not almost.

Bought separately this is six purchases: laundry tablets, dishwasher tablets, toilet tablets, a dish soap starter, a hand soap starter, and the brush with its sponges. Add those up at their own prices and the total comes to more than the set. The struck-through price on the offer band is that sum of the separate items, not a number we invented.

After the first order the sums change again, because you are buying refills rather than bottles. The tin, the glass and the brush handle stay where they are.

Across the set we leave out PVA, microplastics, phosphates, chlorine bleach, synthetic fragrance, parabens, phthalates, alcohol ethoxylates, PFAS and PFOS. They are named one by one because a vague promise is easy to make and impossible to check.

We will not tell you a formula is free of all chemicals, because water is one and so is everything else in the tin. What we can tell you is which ingredients we leave out and what the rest are for: every item in the set carries its full ingredient list on its own product page, with a line on what each one does.