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Making your own soap is what you make it—simple or advanced, a one-off project or a committed hobby, scented or unscented—but the green boons are numerous: you can choose your own ingredients, avoiding the chemicals that plague commercial soaps and other personal care products; you avoid the environmental tolls of extraneous packaging, labeling, and long-distance shipping; and it serves as the ideal eco-friendly gift.

How to make your own soap

Check out these GY-recommended tips and resources to learn how to make your own soap:

• Learn about different soapmaking methods and choose the one that's right for you. Remember that soapmaking can be a tricky, involved, and somewhat dangerous endeavor. The uninitiated should start with the melt and pour method, where a pre-made base is melted, fragrance and color is added, and the concoction is poured into a mold. Cold process soapmaking is the most popular method, but it's for more advanced sudsy DIYers. Cold process soapmaking calls for animal fats, such as lard and tallow (a no-go for animal lovers), and/or vegetable oils, lye, safety gear, and skill. To get started with both melt and pour and cold process techniques, check out Teach Soap, Millers Homeade Soaps, About.com,The Soap Making Home Page, and the print resources listed below.
• Get the supplies you'll need to get started. Like a painter needs a brush and canvas, a home soapmaker needs a stick blender and a rubber apron. Wholesale Supplies Plus, Cranberry Lane, Bramble Berry, and Ye Olde Soap Shoppe are just some of the online vendors offering the compulsory paraphernalia required in the art of soapmaking. Basic starter kits are also available for those not yet ready to enter the more esoteric realm of conch shell-shaped molds and parsley powder. Retailers like From Nature With Love, Essential Wholesale, and Organic Creations specialize in natural and organic soap-making ingredients like oils, butters, extracts, exfoliants, botanical additives, and more.
  • Ingredients from the garden: Although home soapmaking allows you to practice the ultimate in quality control by picking and choosing exactly what goes into each batch, gardeners have a unique advantage: they can enjoy the fresh fruits and vegetables of their labors by incorporating them into their craft, whether for color, fragrance, exfoliating (hello, strawberries), or other purposes.
  • Get your hands on some biodiesel glycerin: In sync with the rising interest in biodisel as a car fuel and home heating alternative, soapmaking has also found a new, albeit different, audience. The process of making biodiesel (transesterification) and soap (saponification) are closely related; leftover glycerin from biodiesel production can be reused in bar soap. For more on the biodiesel/soap connection, check out the International Institute for Ecological Agriculture and Utah Biodiesel Supply.
• Learn about your new hobby by joining a soapmaking group. Soapmaking can be a community-centric leisure pursuit. Joining a soapmaking group—and there are many, ranging from the Texas Soapmakers Association to the Handcrafted Soapmakers Guild—allows one to swap recipes and techniques with fellow enthusiasts. To find a soap-a-holic support group near you, check out Meetup.
• Apply what you've learned to make other homemade personal care items. If you've grown fond of soapmaking, fill your shower and medicine cabinet with homemade goodies. Everything from face wash and masks to shampoo can be made from ingredients used in soapmaking and from other natural around-the-house-and-garden items. Head on over to All Natural Beauty and MakeYourCosmetics.com for some recipes.

Find it! Soapmaking resources

Making your own soap helps you go green because...

• You control the ingredients, eliminating unwanted chemicals and animal byproducts from your personal soap stash. If desired, you can include only natural and organic ingredients.
• There is no fossil fuel-intensive shipping or packaging and labeling involved with homemade soaps.

Most popular commercially produced bar or liquid soaps contain a variety of potentially hazardous chemicals, including triclosan, diethanolamine (DEA), parabens and phthalates, as well as artificial dyes and fragrances. These chemicals can adversely affect the environment and your health. Triclosan, an antibacterial agent, has been found in 55 percent of streams examined in 2002 at levels high enough to disrupt the natural life cycle of frogs.[1] It is also a common skin irritant and may form dioxin and chloroform in the right circumstances, which are both probable carcinogens. DEA (also related to the additives TEA and MEA), used as an emulsifier or foaming agent, is a suspected carcinogen. The paraben family of preservatives can affect the endocrine system, which produces the body's hormones. Phthalates, sometimes labeled as DEHP, DHP, and DBP5, but not always listed on a product's label if it's part of a fragrance, may cause reproductive and developmental problems.

Many of these chemicals are derived from petroleum, so their manufacture and use contributes to the same environmental concerns as oil production, which include about 2.6 million gallons of oil spilled every month during transportation and about 71 million pounds of toxins released into the air and water during refinement.[2]

Packaging waste

Homemade soaps also avoid the wasteful packaging associated with store-bought soaps. The plastic bottles that hold so many of the soaps and body cleansers we purchase are made from petroleum, and, in 2006, 27.5 million tons of plastic products were sent to the landfill. Plastic bottles are not biodegradable; when they end up as trash in landfills, they stay there for up to 700 years before beginning to decompose.[3] Even those soaps packaged in paper take their toll. The demand for paper for packaging and other purposes has led to unsustainable forest management and clear-cutting. In 2006, over 41 million tons of paper products were taken to landfills, constituting 34 percent of the total waste stream.[4]

Transport

Homemade products also completely avoid the eco-ills of transport: gasoline—a petroleum-based, non-sustainable resource whose extraction and production has caused major environmental damage to soil, surface and ground waters, and local ecosystems—fuel the trucks that transport goods from source to store. Petroleum refineries are major contributors to toxic air pollutants, like carbon monoxide and sulfur dioxide. And, 20 pounds of carbon dioxide (CO₂)—the leading contributor to global warming—are released for every gallon of gasoline burned, making the transportation sector responsible for about a quarter of overall US CO₂ emissions.[5] In fact, the US transportation sector alone emits more CO₂ than all but three other countries' total combined emissions from all sources.[6] And because no combustion is perfectly clean, this trucking of goods is also a primary source of local smog- and soot-causing air pollution.

Drawbacks

A key ingredient for many home soapmakers are essential oils. While essential oils are a natural alternative to the synthetics found in conventional soaps, there are concerns about the over-harvesting of plants, as it can take hundreds of pounds of plant matter to produce an ounce of essential oil. Case in point: it takes over 1,000 pounds of jasmine to produce one pound of pricey jasmine essential oil.[7] Additionally, many essential oils sold in the US are produced overseas—traveling far and making many stops before reaching you. The fuel consumption and carbon emissions associated with this long journey may negate a vial of essential oil's inherent eco-friendliness.

Additionally, there's the issue of lard (pig fat) and tallow (cow fat), two traditional soap ingredients popular (although not mandatory) in boutique soap production. Although these fats are waste products and animals are not raised and slaughtered exclusively for soap production, vegetable-based ingredients still use fewer resources like water and grain than animal-based ones. Animal derivatives like honey and milk are also popular ingredients in "natural" homemade soaps.

External links

• TreeHugger - Easy homemade soap
• Green Living Tips - Soap and the environment