Solid detergents are back, now as sheets, tiles, and tablets

Walk through the cleaning aisle of a typical US grocery store and you’ll find the detergent selection is dominated by pods and big bottles of liquid. A forlorn box of powder sits on the bottom shelf, its label imploring shoppers to try the pods. Pods rule in the dishwasher detergent section; liquid leads on the laundry side.

In a small section of an eye-level shelf, though, is a newcomer: detergent sheets and tiles. Their modest showing at the grocery store obscures the true popularity of these novel ways to deliver detergent. Sheets, in particular, have ridden a strong consumer trend toward home delivery of cleaning products and were the primary laundry detergent for 21% of US households in 2025, according to Jamie Rosenberg, a cleaning-industry analyst at the market research firm Mintel Group.

These solid detergents, which use a fast-dissolving polymer matrix to hold ingredients together, are nothing like the little detergent pucks available decades ago that often failed to dissolve and flopped. Most manufacturers use polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) to hold together their solid products, but other firms are avoiding this controversial ingredient in favor of biobased materials. Winning or losing in solid-form cleaning products could come down to mastering the best way to hold them together.

The earliest laundry detergent sheets emerged in the 2010s but without as much fanfare as the squishy, colorful pods that came out around the same time. The big marketers Unilever and Church & Dwight offer the sheets under their brands Seventh Generation and Arm & Hammer, respectively, but most products in the category are sold by small, private-label brands.

That dynamic changed earlier this year, when the cleaning-product giant Procter & Gamble jumped into the fray with the national rollout of a solid product called Tide evo. They’re not exactly sheets—P&G calls them tiles—but they answer some of the same perceived demand for compact, solid, waterless detergents. The tiles, about 49 cm² and a centimeter thick, are soft and silky in texture.

P&G unveiled Tide evo at the music, culture, and science festival South by Southwest (SXSW) in 2024 and then used Colorado as a test market before releasing them across the US this April. The firm has been working on Tide evo for more than a decade, according to Jennifer Ahoni, director of scientific communication for its fabric-care business.

The main cleaning agents in the tiles are traditional laundry detergent surfactants, including sodium lauryl and laureth sulfates and linear alkylbenzene sulfonates. What’s new is that P&G has figured out a way to spin the surfactants and PVA together into fibers that give the tile both structure and flexibility. “The magic of this product is these fibers,” said Mark Sivik, a research and development leader at the firm.

Ahoni and Sivik spoke with C&EN at length just after the SXSW launch in 2024, but P&G provided only limited, written comments for this article.

Fabric made of the fibers forms the outer envelope of the tiles as well as multiple layers within to separate active cleaning ingredients—including enzymes, dispersants, and soil release and anti-redeposition agents—that could otherwise interfere with each other. In use, capillary action along the fibers draws water across and through the layers, speeding up dissolution, Sivik said. “We’ve removed a lot of the inerts and fillers to make this the most compact product that we have today.”

P&G’s marketing describes Tide evo as composed of 100% concentrated cleaning ingredients. But the formula does include PVA, which has no cleaning activity. In P&G’s written responses to C&EN, the firm says the polymer acts as a structural aid. Though the tiles are a lot more concentrated than standard liquid laundry detergents, which are roughly 75% water, the firm told C&EN in 2024 that each tile is about 5% PVA. That’s comparable to the amount of PVA used as the film that surrounds pods and about a quarter of the portion of PVA used in many detergent sheets.

P&G also highlights the reduction in plastic use that comes from shipping Tide evo in paper packaging instead of the bulky plastic bottles used for liquid detergent. Not shipping around tons of water also sharply reduces the carbon footprint of the product.

Most independent experts agree that the types of PVA used in cleaning are readily biodegradable, but some groups have questioned how well the material breaks down in wastewater systems that are not already acclimated to its presence. Those debates have raised concerns about the synthetic polymer in recent years and led to a ban proposal in New York City in 2024 and restrictions in upcoming European regulations on formulas with 10% or more polymeric film by weight.

Seeking new matrix materials, beyond PVA, for cleaning products

Justified or not, the pressure on PVA creates interest in other materials that can take solid-format detergents beyond powder. In early May, the detergent-sheet manufacturer CleanlyEco bought a license from the chemical-technology licensing firm Soane Materials to use microfibrillated cellulose as the structural component of laundry detergent sheets.

CleanlyEco already makes PVA-based laundry sheets at its plant in rural Slovakia on a white-label basis for several European brands, CEO Erik Varga says. It’s been working for about a year with Soane’s material, which consists of cellulose strands 1 to 5 μm in diameter and hundreds of micrometers long.

Varga says it was a challenge at first to swap matrix materials. But after changing out “a lot of parts,” CleanlyEco is doing days-long runs with the cellulose instead of PVA. The plant’s overall capacity is in the tens of millions of sheets per year, Varga says, and he’s ready to scale the new sheets as the market responds. The initial license with Soane covers laundry sheets in Europe and has options to expand to other regions and applications in the future.

In addition to meeting demand for fully biobased products, the cellulosic material has chemical advantages, says Soane president Leo Kasehagen. Microfibrillated cellulose acts as a binder for the other ingredients and then, in water, as a dispersant. Making the sheets break down quickly in a variety of water temperature and water hardness conditions is the firm’s real contribution, he says.

Compared with PVA, cellulose has greater chemical compatibility with alkaline materials such as surfactants, allowing it to carry 50% more cleaning ingredients per gram, Kasehagen says. Less of it is thus needed: the sheets are 15–23% cellulose, whereas competing sheets are 40% PVA. Another advantage is that the processing takes place mostly at room temperature instead of the 80 °C needed for PVA. Along with energy and safety advantages, keeping the process cooler is better for enzymes, which add a lot of cleaning power but can denature in high heat.

Solid detergent formats beyond the laundry room

Some executives in the cleaning industry wonder if they can hold their solid products together using polymers that are already in detergents as active ingredients.

One candidate is a set of polymers derived from a fermentation-derived chemical, itaconic acid, that the US Department of Energy has held up (PDF) as a promising building block to replace petrochemicals.

Polyitaconic acid is already in use in several mass-market dishwasher detergents as a dispersant, chelant, and spot-prevention agent—standard roles for polymers. In laundry detergents, polyitaconic acid does similar work preventing soil redeposition and dealing with hard water. The incumbent active polymers in detergent formulations are mostly synthetic polyacrylates.

At the American Cleaning Institute annual conference in January, John R. Shaw, CEO of the polyitaconic acid maker Itaconix, shared a sample formulation for a dishwasher detergent tablet. The firm makes the low-molecular-weight polymer and derivatives from imported itaconic acid at its New Hampshire plant. Shaw displayed tablets that contain polyitaconic acid at about 15% by weight along with ingredients such as sodium carbonate, a cleaning agent that saponifies oils and fats.

Keeping spots and scale off clean dishes is a big part of what conventional ethoxylated and propoxylated surfactants accomplish in a dishwasher, Shaw said, so more of Itaconix’s polymer means less surfactant. In fact, the sample formulation he showed is less than 10% surfactant and uses only sophorolipids, an emerging surfactant that until now has been used mostly in supporting roles.

On a tablet manufacturing line, the polyitaconic acid also helps hold everything together in a stable shape without the need for a dissolvable wrapper or separate binding ingredients. Combining functions shortens the ingredient label and brings the weight down to 8 g, about half the mass of leading pods and tablets.

The dishwasher detergent is something of a warm-up for the laundry detergent, Shaw says. Dishwashers run hot, which helps ingredients dissolve. In the laundry room, colder wash cycles are growing in popularity. They cut energy use and help clothes last longer but make dissolution a challenge.

That solubility concern won’t be a surprise to detergent early adopters. The first generations of detergent pods and, more recently, sheets were plagued by complaints of clumps and smears of leftover PVA that hadn’t dissolved properly. And industry experts cite incomplete dissolution as the main reason that liquid detergents have beaten powders, especially in the US, for decades.

Solid formats beyond the cleaning machines

Novel solid formats are also gaining ground in the personal care sector. The ability to sell concentrates and refills is the main point of products being in the solid phase for the start-up Capsule Minimal. Its first offerings are personal care products such as shampoo and foaming hand wash, and cofounder Ami Krupik says he plans to expand into home care products and paints.

The firm’s tablets and granules don’t just dissolve when added to water in reusable bottles; they go through a programmed series of steps that can take hours. Capsule Minimal uses layering, porosity changes, and thermodynamic trickery to mimic at home the production process that would normally happen in a factory.

For example, Krupik says, the outer layer of a tablet for foaming hand soap pretreats the water with ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid (EDTA) to neutralize metal ions. Once that coating dissolves, varying particle sizes and 3D-printed channels help release ingredients in a controlled sequence. Heat of solvation can add heat or cold at different steps.

Krupik says the home-mixing approach slashes the carbon footprint of the final product by 95% compared with traditional products and can cut costs by 50%. Similar to what detergent makers are saying about their new solid formats, a big chunk of that environmental and cost advantage comes from not needing to ship ton after ton of water.

Though the new solid formats seem to be catching on, some in the cleaning industry see them as a passing fad.

“I can attest that there is excitement in the marketplace with regards to the sheet format for washing machines, no doubt riding multiyear gains of the single-dose laundry detergent market at large,” says Taylor Sutherland, president of the powder-detergent maker Charlie’s Soap. “The underlying problem is that they just don’t function very well, and that has been verified by third-party tests.”

“Perhaps one of the brands will crack the efficacy problem, but unless that happens, I see the detergent sheets as hitting their upper limit soon,” Sutherland says.

Indeed, laundry sheets get mixed results in tests by the social media laundry educator Zachary Pozniak, a dry cleaner by trade. He says in multiple videos that smaller sheets with a high percentage of PVA binder struggle to pack in an appropriate amount of surfactant.

A 3.5 g sheet that is 40% binder has room for about 1.4 g of cleaning ingredients. “It’s just not enough detergent,” Pozniak says in a recent video. “Somebody wake me up when there’s a sheet that weighs like 12 g.” P&G’s Tide evo tiles weigh in at 22 g, well in line with standard laundry dosing recommendations, and score well in Pozniak’s ranking.

According to Mintel, the laundry detergent market in the US alone is worth $11.4 billion a year, and automatic dishwasher detergent is another $2 billion. Even with a mixed performance record, the new solid formats are already claiming a significant share of that market. With major brands moving in and ingredient makers bringing new chemistry, the solids may be poised to push liquids to the bottom shelf alongside the old-fashioned powders.