Remember when laundry products manufacturers reduced the size of their plastic containers by switching to a more "environmentally friendly concentrated formula"? There was a bit of an outcry when it came out what percentage of product was nothing more than added water, as I remember it. So the perception was that we were "filling our landfills with large containers" just because a lot of water was being added to give customers a better feeling of value for money.
So almost overnight all the containers for liquid soaps and softeners got smaller when they simply stopped watering down their active ingredients. In effect, swapping perceived value for money for environmental warm fuzzies. I don't know if there were alternative reasons that contributed to their decision to reduce the water content, but I wouldn't be too surprised to hear of one as the swiftness with which this switch took place was quite extraordinary if the only reason really was just spinning some bad PR.
The problem that nobody ever addressed at the time or indeed since, has been that washing machines designed and sold before this "environmental shrinkage" took place do not rinse out the much thicker product from the load cups very efficiently. There was no PR campaign to inform folks that they should add that missing water back in at home if they expected the same results as before. At least until new washing machines took into account the much thicker products and reached showroom floors and homes, but that doesn't happen over night. The average lifespan for a set of laundry machines is many more years than people can be expected to remember something like "Oh yeah, I need to add a little water back in to these load cups."
So gummy messy automatic laundry product cups abound. All I'm saying is remember to add a little water back in when you fill them... And all will run normally. Until some day far in the future when you have a new machine that was actually designed for this thicker product. But of course by then, there'll probably be a change brought about by some PR crisis that will render the new design less than perfect by the time the delivery truck drops it off at your house anyway. But that's another story, for another day...
