Laundry and dishwasher pods and sheets are made with or wrapped in petroleum-based plastic called polyvinyl alcohol, also called PVA or PVOH. This plastic is designed to dissolve, but it doesn’t disappear. Pods are plastic. PVA is the plastic polymer in almost all dishwasher and laundry pods and sheets. PVA is the thin plastic wrapping around pods and is woven into laundry sheets to keep them intact.
PVA is designed to dissolve, but unfortunately, it does not disappear. In the U.S. alone, an estimated 20 billion PVA-wrapped dishwashers and laundry pods are used annually. A study published in the International Journal
