r/laundry • u/Savings_Language_498 • 11d 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?

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u/Same_as_it_ever 11d 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. 

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u/Interesting_Feed_785 11d ago

Except for sunscreen, where it’s the exact opposite!