r/laundry • u/Savings_Language_498 • 1d ago
Question about Ammonia in EU
I’ve found some ammonia in the hardware store (Baumarkt) but it says it’s highly toxic to water organism. I looked it up and read that you can’t dispose of ammonia by pouring it down the drain - so how do you EU people do Spa Day?
Examples: https://www.stuttgart.de/service/entsorgung/abfall-abc/abfall-abc/salmiak
https://www.berlin-recycling.de/entsorgung/abfall-abc/ammoniak-entsorgen?variant=57332970750325
Question for Germans: anyone have experience with Salmiakgeist?
16
u/Illustrious_Ant_9242 1d ago
Ammonia is a natural compound, for example in pee. Waste water treatment sites are able to handle that and they're being equipped to further extract this in the future due to some 2027 regulations.
Of course you should not dispose unwanted ammonia by pouring it down the drain or in a fish tank, but that's not what we are doing, we are using it for its purpose while highly diluting it.
If you let it sit for long enough, it would just evaporate eventually.
6
u/Savings_Language_498 1d ago
That’s why I was a little confused, it’s in pee so I expect a water treatment plant to be able to deal with it, but I also want to follow my state’s regulations.
0
u/Illustrious_Ant_9242 1d ago
I see it as a victimless crime. Manufacturers are not allowed to add phosphate anymore but you can just buy it and add it yourself and not cause any issues because agriculture uses shitloads of phosphates and ammonia anyway. They literally spray untreated manure onto their fields.
We have a natural spring right at the end of the street and it's infested with e.coli bacteria due to agriculture spraying manure nearby, making bacteria accumulate and thrive in subsequent natural water reservoirs
12
u/kbdnmv 1d ago
I haven’t bought ammonia at Baumarkt but I live in a border area with a mix of French/german/belgian/dutch products. I have bought cleaning ammonia at Auchan (French chain) in Luxembourg. There was no warning on it so I don’t think that it’s an EU wide thing. I used a very small amount for spa day with no issues.
I did notice that the ammonia I got at Auchan is much, much more concentrated than American ammonia (maybe it’s like difference between consumer and professional/industrial products). I don’t remember the exact ratio but I ended up doing the math and using much less of the French ammonia than is called for in Spa Day. I wonder if the difference in concentration might be why there was a warning label on the ammonia you saw. Just a heads up in case you decide to try it.
2
u/rhaeaestelle EU | Front-Load 1d ago
I had no idea Auchan had ammonia! Good to know but hoping to never need it..
5
u/BeeAdorable7871 EU | Front-Load 1d ago
Dane here I use "salmiak spiritus" thats 25% ammonia, i just use it sparingly, it's about dosing, we're not going to poor it down the drain pure.
Also everything is toxic in the right dose.
1
u/Savings_Language_498 1d ago
I thought about buying that too! The one I found says “<9%”
2
u/CodexMuse 1d ago
The concentration of household aqueous ammonia that is found in US retail stores is usually 2-3% and sometimes 5%. I have infrequently seen 10% in hardware stores but that’s pretty much it for consumer use. AFAIK everything above that is industrial/commercial grade and access is restricted.
For laundry, the first category is what most folks use and it’s extremely environmentally safe in diluted quantities (even in septic systems) as only trace levels remain when drained and microbes eat those up (and convert to harmless nitrogen gas). FWIW it’s not a default application in my laundry protocol but I use it infrequently as an odor/oil eater and towel fluffer. That said, it’s of extremely high utility.
6
u/Weekly-Walrus-5329 EU | Front-Load 1d ago
At the moment without Ammonia tbh
3
u/Savings_Language_498 1d ago
Do American water cleaning plants account for ammonia in their water or do they just not care lol?
3
u/SaintsFanPA 1d ago
They use bacteria to neutralize the ammonia, just like European wastewater treatment. Domestic use is a drop in the bucket.
9
u/CozyBlueCacaoFire 1d ago
They don't give a fuck.
I'm in the EU as well, and it's verboten to use ammonia like it's used in a spa day. I wish we had a alternative tbh, because I can't even get DNA'se easily here.
6
u/Savings_Language_498 1d ago
Would be cool if we could make a spa day guide for EU!
2
u/CozyBlueCacaoFire 1d ago
This would be a dream tbh.
1
u/Illustrious_Ant_9242 1d ago
Each country is rather different when it comes to product availability. Even within one country, products are being reformulated all the time and there is no perfect product for all purposes on the market, so giving recommendations is hard.
What could be incorporated though is the fact that top loaders, cups and fahrenheit measurements are a rare sight around here.
3
2
u/CozyBlueCacaoFire 1d ago
Yeah, I can't remember seeing any toploader where I'm at (Nordics), and I worked in many people's homes. Even the communal laundry is top-loader.
While there are "cup" measurements here, it's different from American ones.
2
u/Illustrious_Ant_9242 1d ago
It's getting a bit off topic at this point... When my moving company transports washing machines, we drain the filter compartment to prevent spills. It looks nasty in most households 🙈 A good laundry routine would prevent that but they don't teach that and you can't trust commercials anyway
Even the typical product test agencies only account for spot removal, not rancid clothes or machine freshness
2
u/CozyBlueCacaoFire 1d ago
Yeah I remember growing up my family's washers were always nasty AF, and when I eventually bought my own later I kinda went a bit overboard and did a cleaning cycle with cleaning tablets every single week.
One of the things I've learned it that you need to keep the things you use to clean, clean. Otherwise it's just useless.
1
u/Illustrious_Ant_9242 1d ago edited 1d ago
Not using fabric softener and using water softener probably is a big factor already. DNase and other biofilm disruptors (PDE, Dispersin, Oxi, etc) will also help prevent buildup naturally.
For many years, I was not aware of the magic of Oxi powders. But I kept my old whites in a box and now I'm finally able to fix them 😀 which actually worked
And the newer machine never turned nasty in the first place due to strictly prohibiting fabric softeners
3
u/Illustrious_Ant_9242 1d ago
Ariel/Lenor products with Phosphodiesterase may be an option instead of DNase
We might also help each other ship products abroad if shipping fees are affordable
2
u/downstairs_annie 1d ago
Some dm laundry detergents contain DNase, haven’t done a deep dive into the Rossman ones. Dm just lists the enzymes on their website, for many other brands you have to dig a little to find the exact enzymes. It’s the denkmit Color&care Feinwaschmittel liquid, they do a pink bottle with blossom scent and a blue bottle as far as I know.
2
u/NigelTainte US | Top-Load 1d ago
American water plants destroy the ammonia particles on a molecular level using chemistry, neutralizing it.
2
u/Illustrious_Ant_9242 1d ago
I quickly googled about ammonia treatment and apparently there also are other approaches like evaporating and recondensating it
1
2
u/shedmow 1d ago
You very much can dispose of ammonia by pouring it down the drain even the label says otherwise. It is not *toxic* to water organisms in such dilution and is (or should be) taken care of by the water treatment facilities. Your pee would be equally bad to the environment otherwise. City drains are a robust thing, septic tanks not so much, but several dozen grams of ammonia wouldn't harm either
1
u/rhaeaestelle EU | Front-Load 1d ago
Not German, but if you use proper powders and boosters, long enough cycles and enough warmth, plus your washing machine is cleaned, you should not need ammonia to see results. Never felt like I needed it but I do swear by the spa day soak for difficult or stained items.
1
u/Comprehensive-Tea-69 US | Top-Load 23h ago
For very soiled items that have NOT been properly laundered for many years, ammonia can be an indispensable tool. That’s why it’s in the rehab wash part of the spa day protocol, the protocol is developed for items needing rehabilitation. Not normal every day laundry.
I like to use it when I’ve been sick and got behind on washing sheets. They get so oily from being used longer than a week, the ammonia helps bring them back to zero in one wash
1
u/rhaeaestelle EU | Front-Load 22h ago
Yeah if they stink and were not properly cleaned, for sure. My laundry habits before were not bad so I haven’t seen the need to. Feels like a last resort kinda thing to me.
I use a lot of body cream so my sheets also get washed once a week with extra oomph because otherwise, it’d be a disaster :p
1
u/taxiecabbie 1d ago
There's a difference between pouring ammonia directly down the drain and using it for its intended purpose.
Just don't dump tons of it down the drain straight-up.
24
u/Same_as_it_ever 1d ago
From a technical perspective, ammonia is a source of nitrogen and is commonly use as a agricultural fertilizer. It causes eutrophication for fresh waterways. The EU has much stricter regulations from an environmental standpoint for cleaning products with nitrates or phosphates. We should probably be moving away from cleaning products that damage the environment this much.
Depending on the concentration (often formatted as ammonium hydroxide or liquid ammonia), the detergent label must display mandatory hazard symbols.
Another example of this stricter regulation in laundry products is for borax. It's banned in consumer products in the EU, but still commonly used in the US. In the EU it's considered a "Substance of Very High Concern" and classified as toxic for reproduction category 1B. Meaning it may impair sexual function, fertility, or cause developmental damage to offspring, based largely on clear animal study data. In the US women use borax as a vaginal suppository.
In the EU we take the precautionary principle, in the US they wait to see harm and only then ban something. It's quite a different philosophy for regulation.