A battle for the bar of soap

Sandy McDonald

Soap is great, a bar of soap is even better

Did you know that soap molecules from a bar of soap literally kills germs?

Apparently, a soap molecule has a ‘fat loving’ tail. And germs, including Covid, have a lipid (fat-like substance) membrane.

Next time you lather soap up on your hands, picture these little soap molecules delight as they go in for the kill. ‘Num, dinner!’

If a membrane is particularly tough, they recruit each other to imprison the germ. Then, as you innocently rinse the soap of your hands, down the drain they go. Brilliant.

After years of a pandemic, we have (or should have) become addicted to washing our hands.

The trouble with that, is that it has massively increased the sale of soap dispensed from plastic bottles.

Our concern is not soap, it is how it is dispensed.

SAD FACT: Worldwide 1 million plastic bottles are bought every second. EEK!

Don’t you think we should do anything that will reduce that appalling statistic.

If you were part of a family of four, and you might go through an average of ten bottles of soap a year,( allowing for those that don’t wash, are too young to wash, or wash a lot), that would be around forty plastic bottles in landfill a year. Now multiply that by a million families, that’s 40 million bottles; ten million families, 400 million bottles a year.

The humble bar of soap

Suddenly a bar of soap starts to shine like a little beacon to landfill-free living.

So why not a return to the humble bar of soap, the one that hasn’t required families of orangutans to lose their home, but been lovingly made by someone with patchouli oil and peace.

Or Min says . . . or make you own bars of soap, buy sustainable products, choose recyclable bottles, because it is the little things we do that matter.

DIG

Even the most basic bars of soap require a small measure of palm oil. However, mass production of palm oil is responsible for a massive loss of forests and habitats for creatures like the Orangutan.

But, as in all things gawple, it turns out this is a complex issue. According to the WorldWild Life fund, boycotting the use of palm oil is not the solution, as it is an efficient oil that uses less land than other oils, and provides an income to millions.

The best thing we can do is encourage sustainable uses of palm oil, by choosing soaps that use palm oil from any one of the suppliers listed in the green on the chart below. The suppliers should be RSDO certified, the global standard for sustainable production and where growers help to protect the environment.

Palm Oil Record

ACT

Make your own soap

These two links are to beautiful websites that list dozens of recipes for bars of soap you can make at home.

Spruce Crafts

Lovely Greens

Buy recyclable bottles

Two enterprising Australian women have a solution to plastic bottles in landfill. Sian Murray and Ami Bateman of PleasantState have developed a non-toxic home cleaning tablet that dissolves in water. If we took it up their simple but brilliant solution, we could rid the world of billions of tons of plastic waste.

Neither chemists, of manufacturers, Sian and Ami were determined to find the right partners to help develop the tablet and fund their idea. And they did it all during the pandemic.