Washing enzymes: Please rinse and return | The Economist.
An interesting “Made in India” innovation, of global significance, under way?
“WHEN industrialists use enzymes to speed up chemical reactions, they generally take care to attach those enzymes to solid surfaces and run the chemicals past them. Enzymes are expensive, and not to be thrown away lightly. Yet millions of householders do precisely that whenever they wash their clothes. Lots of washing powders contain enzymes, but these never get recycled. Instead, they are just flushed down the drain.
Chandra Pundir and Nidhi Chauhan, biochemists at Maharshi Dayanand university in Haryana, India, propose to do something about that. They see no reason why washing enzymes should suffer this ignominious fate and, as they report in Industrial and Engineering Chemistry Research, they have found there is no reason why they should.”