Finish Powerball Dishwasher Detergent Tabs: Individually Wrapped for More Waste!

Individually wrapped for more waste.

I recently changed dishwasher detergent. Previously I had used Sunlight "Power Pacs." They came in a plastic box with a lid and the directions stated very clearly that if they got wet there would be trouble, hence the sealing plastic box. This box would have been easy to recycle after, however, I reused it instead to store rags under the kitchen sink (that I use for cleaning), so that they wouldn’t go everywhere or get damp, dingy, dirty, or disgusting.

I reused my old dishwasher detergent box to store rags under the kitchen sink to keep them tidy and clean.

From Amazon Prime, I ordered Finish Powerball Dishwasher Detergent Tabs due to their high rating by other customers. I had never tried them before. Their performance has been good so far for me, however, I am dissatisfied with their packaging. 

The tabs came in a cardboard box that would be easy to recycle, however, when one opens the box, one finds that every single tab (there are 110 of them in this box) is individually wrapped in a silver plastic foil wrapper. This is a huge waste and even if the tabs needed to stay dry like the Sunlight tabs, why couldn’t they have been put into a recyclable plastic box rather than individually wrapped in this plastic wrapper that becomes garbage and will just clog up the landfill (plus their packaging has no hope of being reused like the Sunlight packaging above). Or what about a compostable wrapper? Surely there's a better packaging solution.

The cardboard box wasn't a bad start for packaging.

But I opened it up and found all of the individually wrapped tabs. 110 tabs X all the plastic wrappers = a lot of waste.

Companies need to think more carefully about how they package their products. As much as I like these Finish tabs, the packaging is so wasteful, I think I’ll have to go back to the drawing board once they are finished and find a new type of detergent that has less wasteful packaging, that will have less of a negative impact on the environment (I know using a dishwasher is probably not ideal either, but we just have to try to do whatever little bit we can to change our lifestyles so that future generations might be able to survive in this world). Finish Powerball Dishwasher Detergent Tabs are a prime example of overpackaging.