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

In laundry, in dish washing, and beyond, brands and chemical firms are innovating around waterless formats

by Craig Bettenhausen

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.”

Recommended

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.

Recommended