The history of that is very specifically British and was driven by tabloid stories in England in the 1970s. It never had any traction in Ireland as we don't have the same print media, even though we might share some of the product supply chains.
You can pretty much blame Lever Bros and the tabloids for it.
P&G developed Ariel at their European Technology Centre at Strombeek-Bever in Belgium in the 1960s. It was one of the very first enzymatic detergents. Henkel may have had a competitor product, but Lever Bros at the time really didn't and was blindsided by it in its home market in the UK. Seems enzymatic detergents were introduced by Otto Röhm in 1914 (the inventor of plexiglass- had businesses in Germany & the USA.
The initial Ariel products launched across Europe in several markets in 1967, mostly in low foaming formats as front loaders / horizontal drum top loader machines were already fairly dominant.
The UK market was a bit different, with very dominant top loaders, notably twin-tubs but also some top loading agitator automatics. As a result, Ariel was launched there as a high foaming formula suitable for those machines, but with enzymes, while Bold Automatic was their band for front loaders, which were still niche. Ariel launched there in 1969 as "the biological miracle' and it really took the market by storm and was taking Persil, Omo and other brand's market share as it was a very good product.
Lever Bros didn't really have a competing product. Persil was aimed very much at twin tubs, and was quite traditionally formulated and also other brands like Omo (weirdly dropped in the UK and Ireland since the 1980s even though it predates Persil and is an actual British brand) and Rinso which was also dropped in the 1970s, and was once a huge brand.
Persil was very quickly reformulated to include enzymes, and somehow was alleged to cause allergies and may well have done at the time. The flames were fanned by a flurry of paranoid articles in the tabloids about the horrors of New Persil.
Meanwhile, Ariel seemed to be ticking away quite nicely mopping up Lever's market share.
Lever seemingly lagged in terms of enzyme R&D or didn't yet have access to products from Novo Nordisk (now Novozymes) that P&G had,
To prevent market loss, they went into PR over drive and launched <span style="text-decoration: underline;">Persil Non-Bio</span>, which was in reality just an old fashioned formula, without enzymes - classic Lever Persil from the pre-enzyme days.
The result of the PR drive and the articles at the time was to instil an unjustified fear of enzymes and of the term 'bio' or 'biological' and it was driven by tabloid conspiracy theories, a bit like the modern nonsense about 5G.
Persil found its niche again as a low tech non-bio powder and housewives swore by it. They then pushed it increasingly into a sensitive skin market niche and the more they did that the more damage was done to the term 'bio' or 'enzymes'. When they did launch with enzymes again, they were quite cautious not to mention them and called it New System Persil and so on.
So, that's basically the history of how non-bio is such a fixation in the UK - a marketing mess-up and a tabloid newspaper scare story that's taken 50 years to get over!
You'll still find a lot of companies are reluctant to write Enzymes or Biological on their packaging and that skin sensitive products <span style="text-decoration: underline;">must</span> be non-bio!
From an ecological point of view, it's not great as it's encouraging the use of very chemical heavy products when enzymes could be doing a lot of the heavy lifting these days.
The most ironic thing about this enzyme being used in detergents is it seems to be a British invention, yet it will probably be hardest to market in Britain itself.
[this post was last edited: 11/24/2020-18:25]