There’s a lot of news around, what with the pandemic stretching into a second year, climate change hitting Texas and the erosion of the norms of liberal society by bad actors across the board.
*This, though, is a 5 minute read about a happy domestic recognition.*
You’ll be glad to hear that I’ve rediscovered soap. Though, strangely, you may actually care more than the family I live with — because it’s not about my personal hygiene.
For much of my life I’ve washed in communal bathrooms. Whether swimming before work, living in Japan, playing competitive sports or for whatever reason, I’ve been in some cleaning spaces where you would not necessarily want to use a communal bar of soap.
Indeed, it only takes a couple of soap bars with hair of uncertain origin to put you off the whole concept. Liquid soap is convenient and clean: carefully designed containers can be placed on sinks and in bathrooms instead of a molten bar stewing in a slurry of soap.
Being stuck at home for a year has given me a different understanding. And now I love my bars of soap.
[SIDEBAR: TIL Soap is not soap. Today I learned that lots of “soap,” including almost all liquid “soap” and laundry cleaner, is not soap but synthetic detergent - say "syndet" and sound clever. Including famous brands. And syndets aren't all bad. But that’s for others to discuss in other forums.
Here is a clear overview
, by a soapmaker.]
On a basic level, at home you can control how you store your soap (so it doesn’t sit in a congealing pool of dirty lather) and — especially in a quarantined pandemic — you know who else is using it (beloved family). And you can choose the soap that lathers in the richest way for your own water. But, for every bar you use rather than bottle, there’s the saving of crude oil that you don’t flush down the plughole.
Each home is an island and it takes a certain, small but not negligible, amount of energy to bring in supplies. Does it take more oil to bring a delivery to my door or does it take more to bring it to the supermarket to sit there? Suddenly these were questions brought to greater prominence by the isolation of every family, the atomization of the household.
So, I still don’t know whether it’s better for the environment to truck in a million cans that will sit there unused for years or to get a million different trucks to bring in a few cans that are immediately used. What does seem clear is that creating plastic packaging to contain heavy liquid goods that are then shipped around the country doesn’t seem like a way to go — unless there’s an overriding reason for it. The relevant scholarly study shows that liquid soaps take five times more energy to get produced, almost 20 times more energy to get packaged and, given their far greater weight per wash, a vast amount more energy to transport to your bathroom than their solid counterparts.
Recently we also moved away from using liquid shampoo and conditioner to bars. Those of you who know me, know that my relationship to shampoo borders on the imaginary but I still have enough follicles to raise a lather. So when my wife — who has a shortish but actual hairstyle introduced these revolutionary objects I claimed an opinion. It turns out that one 4 oz bar of shampoo and a similar bar of conditioner works for me and her just as the full thick 20oz plastic bottles of shampoo and conditioner used to. So, unless there’s some seriously retrograde byproducts from the creation of these bars, we’ve saved some oil.
Likewise we have replaced our monthly delivery of “environmentally friendly” laundry detergent with detergent sheets. These sheets dissolve in water that flows into the house. They take up less room, are much lighter and seem to do a fine job.
Cooking stock and carbonated beverages are two other goods where you can easily avoid paying for the packaging and transportation of water, just flushing more oil down the drain. And, if you have to use products with “aqua” as an ingredient (and we do, too!), try to refill from bulk to minimize packaging.
These aren’t going to save the world on their own, but they are excellent mindfulness exercises about an existential crisis that, to most of us, seems either too massive or too distant to effect. So, buy less liquid and remind yourself and others that we should use less oil to package and to transport heavy goods around the world. Plus, if you are in a first world country, your appliances are probably more efficient than you realize. Run all laundry cold, run all dishwashers on eco, put your laundry out to dry.
There are many small steps between lifestyle and life-saving, but we have to take them.
*This is not a plug for any particular products, we don’t even know which ones we like best, yet. Just a thought to stay clean and stop using oil to transport water.