why doesn’t a liquid laundry/dish detergent pod break down from the detergent inside?

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Why doesn’t the detergent inside cause the package to break down ? I find as soon as water touches it it begins to melt away, why wouldn’t the detergent cause this?

In: Chemistry

6 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Different materials react diffently to one another. The plastic wrap of your pod is highly water soluble, but the content has no water, only detergent and other chemicals. The water in the machine dissolve the wrap while its content dissolve the dirt

Anonymous 0 Comments

I actually got to learn this in one of my chemistry lectures 😀 the inside of the pod actually does have a little water in it despite the little plastic package stuff being water soluble, the reason it doesnt just dissolve is because of the activity coefficient (just describes the ability of mixing) due to it being in the gel stuff, when the pod is in water the activity coefficient is high enough that it can mix and dissolve. Sorry if I didnt phrase it well, just really excited to actually contribute to a question I kinda know c:

Anonymous 0 Comments

The detergent inside the pod contains very little water, so there’s nothing to dissolve the outer part.

Anonymous 0 Comments

In general, pourable detergent is mixed with a bit of water to make it easier to pour and also to increase it’s volume so they can sell it for more money. Tide Pods are way way way WAY more concentrated than the bottle detergent, and therefore have extremely little water. If you ever cut open a tide pod, you’d notice the consistency is almost as thick as set jello.

Anonymous 0 Comments

I thought the tide pods were temp controlled? 70°-105°?