Blueland takes the category on 8.2 out of 10, on a full ingredient list published on the product page, a pressed tablet with no film, a steel tin refilled from compostable paper, and the heaviest certification stack here: EPA Safer Choice, Cradle to Cradle, plus company and welfare marks[3]. It costs $0.417 a load, which is 2.2 times the cheapest product in the table.
Molly’s Suds would have finished at the top and does not appear in the ranking at all. Its loose powder has five named ingredients with CAS numbers, no film, and the cheapest load in the category at $0.192[10]. The product page never describes the packaging, so packaging is marked Not scored, and a rescaled total can only ever flatter the product that published less. Partly scored products are therefore listed without a position and cannot be named in a verdict. The rule is applied to Vove on this page too.
Five of the products here contain polyvinyl alcohol and they bury it to different degrees. Kind Laundry markets “only 4 simple ingredients” and “free of petroleum” on the product page, and the third of those four ingredients is “Polyvinyl Alcohol (biodegradable polymer)”, a petroleum-derived synthetic[11]. The list is on the page, which is more than the other sheet brands manage, but a claim and its own ingredient list should not disagree in the same scroll. That is the undisclosed-contradiction band, and it takes ingredient transparency down to 3 out of 10.
Tru Earth puts polyvinyl alcohol second in its ingredient list, above every surfactant, with the stated function “structuring agent”. That list is on a separate ingredients page. The product page carries no ingredient list and never uses the word[5][6]. Earth Breeze goes further: no ingredient list appears on the product page at all, and polyvinyl alcohol is findable only in the help centre, which confirms it as a structuring agent that holds the cleaning ingredients until they dissolve, on the same site that runs a dedicated article arguing the sheets do not contain microplastics[7][8]. Both take the middle band on transparency and the bottom band on PVA, because the test we apply is what the product page tells you.
None of that makes polyvinyl alcohol a poison, and we will not imply it. The 2021 Arizona State University estimate that much of the PVA reaching US wastewater treatment survives it was funded by a competing format and has been contested[14], and the US EPA keeps detergent-grade polyvinyl alcohol on its Safer Choice list of lower-concern ingredients[15]. The argument is live and we are not going to close it for you. What we score is narrower: whether the product page tells you the polymer is in there, which is a question with an answer.
Dropps is the counter-example. Its film is polyvinyl alcohol, its ingredient list says so in plain words, and the page does not route around it[4]. It takes the middle band on PVA rather than the bottom one, and finishes on 5.1, held down by the film counting as a wrapper on the packaging row. Tide contains polyvinyl alcohol twice over, in the liquid and as the pac film, and the ingredient list had to be read off a third-party transcription because Procter and Gamble’s own SmartLabel pages return nothing to a fetch[12][13]. It scores 2.0 and is unranked, because tide.com is not a shop and publishes no price.
Dirty Labs is the best result for a product that is not a tablet. A liquid in an aluminium bottle has no film by construction, it publishes a CAS-numbered ingredient list, and every mark it carries is a product certification rather than a company one: USDA Biobased at 100 per cent, EPA Safer Choice and Green Seal[9]. It scores 7.3, held back by the middle packaging band for a one-way bottle and by $0.500 a load.
Vove’s two entries land on 7.3 and 7.3, which is arithmetic rather than coincidence: the tin buys the top packaging band and gives back exactly what it costs in cost per load. Both publish a full ingredient list, both have no film, the carton is beaten on price by two products and the tin by four, and both are beaten on certification by five[1][2]. At $0.350 a load the carton is 83 per cent dearer than Molly’s Suds powder. No Vove entry wins a criterion outright here, the tin only draws level with Blueland on packaging, so there is no second verdict naming one.
One thing no detergent on this page fixes. Most of the plastic leaving a washing machine comes from the clothes, not the bottle: a single 6 kg wash of synthetic fabric can shed more than 700,000 microfibres[16]. Changing format does not change that, and any page implying otherwise, including ours, would be wrong.