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Homemade washing liquid - the most ecological solution

Initially published on 22/06/11

Why make your own washing liquid?

 Conventionnal washing liquid, even with eco labels, are not judged satisfactory:
- you don't know exactly where all the ingredients come from, maybe all from differents place. The more ingredients you have, greater the chance is at the cumulative carbon foot-print of all the transport of ingredients is heavy
- if you buy a washing liquid, even ecological, you also buy plastic with it (which makes the footprint heavier)
- Do you know the criterias of the label you chose? Is it strict enough? Is your vaskemiddel really biodragradable in water?
© Dailyllusion

When it comes to ecological (clothes)vaskemiddel, there are two schools: soapnuts and  Marseille soap. They both contain surfactants and are biodegradable in water. Surfactants acts as detergents - they pull fat out of clothes or skin -  and are also contained in ordinary washing liquid. If you want to understand how, wikipedia is your friend, but basically, it is because surfactants " contain both hydrophobic groups (their tails) and hydrophilic groups (their heads)".

French blogs about ecology teem with recipes with Marseille soap (probably because this soap is French) but you can actually use other soaps. That is the solution I chose, which I think is more ecological than nuts.
Indeed these vaskenøtter I hear so much good about are produced at the end of the earth!

What is wrong with soap nuts

These nuts come from a tree, Sapindus Mukorossi, which mostly grows in Asia (some say that the african trees are not that efficient).It is not actually the nut but its shell which is used for laundry; indeed the shell contains saponin, a natural surfactant. 
The advantage with eco nuts is that it is totally biodegradable in water (so is soap). Another one is that it does not deprive local population from food since only the shell is used (not like biodiesel for example). It is even an extra income for some people and the western market is interesting for them as Indians buy more and more chemical washing liquid or powder.
Fair enough, buying vaskenøtter can help them... But I don't really see the point of trying to reduce one's carbon footprinting by importing - with huge quantities of CO2 - something from the ends of the earth.

Marseille soap, less polluting?

That is the reason why I had always chosen soap over nuts, of which the transport was far less polluting...I thought. Indeed someone made me question this with this argument: nuts comes from faraway but one single bags lasts 2 two years (for two people). Is that really a greater footprint than importing soap from the south of France much more often? Maybe, maybe not.

But this other argument was more successfull: we don't know where oils contained in the soap are produced. Probably far far away. And very probably my soap contributes to deforestation in Indonesia because of the use of palm oil in its production, even if I am sure it contains at least 72% olive oil (then it is real Marseille soap).

After that I did not start using vaskenøtter but I tried to look for a better solution, especially since Marseille is not that closed to Norway. Is flaxseed oil (linfrøolje) a better compromise? Probably it is since it is also used in husholdningsåpe and it can be grown in Europe. But it has been very difficult to find flaxseed soap her, or even soap in general, in a cheap and big enough quantity.

If you make it, you know what's in it

How to be sure that my soap does not contain palm oil? How to know where the oils come from? Yeah, you got it right, I decided to make my own soap. It is something I had never wanted to do before, because of sodium hydroxide which is dangerous to manipulate. But after days of research (it's not because I now live myself at a edge of the world, that I must give up ecological habits!), this solution appeared at the simplest, and at something I might not do only for laundry; check up pictures of beautiful homemade soaps and you will know what I means. Have plenty of ideas! :)

So I am very glad to say that yesterday I made my first washing liquid with my first homemade soap.

The recipe with other ingredients to improve efficiency comes in the next article!
TO BE CONTINUED!
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