waste-free liquid soap

i bookmarked an image long ago with the thought that making liquid soap from a bar of soap would save a lot of packaging from reaching the landfill.  bea johnson talked about doing it in her book and i knew i would try it…someday.  in the mean time, i wondered if i needed a separate pot, since i had heard that making soap is a toxic endeavor.  i wanted a separate grater, because i didn't want my other one worn down quicker with the hard soap (it's a style i like that i haven't seen since).  bea's recipe calls for a hand mixer, which i don't have.  i wasn't sure i wanted to use the types of soap they used.  you get the idea…i put it off.

well, i finally gave it a try!  i decided i was only warming the soap- sort of like dishwashing- no extra pot needed.  another grater was bought, but wouldn't have been needed.  i found ways to avoid the need to buy a hand mixer.  i decided to go ahead and give my regular bar soap choice a try.

we buy this bulk soap from whole foods- no packaging, not too expensive and it works great.  i wanted to stick with this soap choice, since decreasing packaging is my main goal. another great benefit of making liquid soap is that it is very cost effective- a total money saver.  my single bar of soap cost $2 and yielded one gallon of liquid soap.  

liquid soap (from a bar of soap)- adapted from bea johnson and the farmer's nest

1.  grate the bar of soap (castille soap and mrs.meyers soap also work- but not all soap does)
2.  add the grated soap to 1 gallon of water in a pot and warm over medium heat, stirring until soap dissolves
3.  let sit overnight.  (i poured my soap into two glass casserole dishes.  a couple of hours after i'd poured my soap into the casserole dishes, it had set.  i put the lids on and went to bed.)
4.  set, it is more like set jello consistency than liquid soap.  here's where you could use your mixer, but i just dove in and mushed it between my fingers…fun!  :)  the farmer's nest said it would end up a snot-like consistency- gross, but true.
5.  pour into containers (i used glass quart jars and an empty shampoo bottle.)

my goal was for this liquid soap to work as hand soap, dish soap, and shampoo.  we tried it for a week as each and it does not work to my satisfaction as dish soap or shampoo.  i would have been ecstatic to have knocked three items off my grocery list and saved all that packaging, but we'll just have to stick with this as money saving hand soap.  (it would also work as shower gel and possibly as shampoo for short hair.)  yes, the plastic bottles that all these products come in can be recycled, but this plastic needs to be processed into new bottles.  this takes a lot of energy.  plus, 100% recycled plastic is not yet a usual end product.  this means that new plastic is constantly being added to the recycled plastic. more new plastic, in addition to new energy to clean, break down and make new plastic product that will never biodegrade is not totally positive.  keeping all those dish soap, shampoo and liquid hand soap bottles out of the system would be incredible, so i am still working on that!

i'd love to hear if you make liquid soap and what tweaks you make!  

love, 
jane 

update:  april 15, 2015  this zero-waste liquid soap is not a success for us.  it was fun to start with a bar of soap and see it come out as liquid soap…plus there is so much of it.  like i said in this post, it did not work as dish soap or shampoo for us, as i'd originally hoped.  we've been trying to use it for liquid hand soap for a while and don't really like it for that either.  it doesn't lather, so we don't really feel like it's cleaning well.  

i have found a natural, low-waste alternative that i do really like for hand soap:  a little bit of castile soap + lots of water in a foaming soap dispenser.  i had a dispenser that came with soap in it, and now i just refill it with my own mixture of soap and water.  castile soap is pricey, so this very diluted mixture will make it last.  

update: March 30, 2018 I no longer buy castile soap, because it is quite expensive + I don't use it in any other ways. I've tried it as dish soap, which I don't like because it is oily, expensive, + doesn't lather. I don't like it for my hair for similar reasons. Now we just use a drop of dish soap to wash our hands. I refill a smaller soap dispenser about 1/4 full at a time, because I find that a full bottle dispenses too much soap + we go through it too fast. This way, I buy the largest bottle of dish soap that I can find at the grocery store (I consider it bulk) + it lasts a long time. One bottle of dish soap works for dishes, hands, + hand washing intimates too.