shampoo bars

To reduce my plastic usage, I have switched from using liquid shampoo which comes in plastic bottles to using bar shampoo which comes in paper wrapping.

First I tried using my normal bar soap for my hair. (It isn't normal mainstream soap though as I don't use ones that contain tallow.) That works fine for occasional use but leaves my hair feeling quite dry. Then I tried J.R. Liggett's Shampoo Bars, which have worked well. I've been using them since August. I bought 2 bars initially, in different scents. I wash my hair about twice a week, so it's been about 38 times since then, and both bars are still mostly intact. They will last quite a while. I haven't tried the conditioner bars, as I don't use conditioner; never felt I've needed it for my hair.

It took some getting used to. The first few times, I lathered up my hands with soap from the bar and rubbed the lather into my hair. I repeated that a few times to get enough soap in my hair. That left the shampoo bar with hairs sticking to it, which I then had to meticulously remove. Subsequently I found that rubbing the bar in a circular motion on the top of my wet head a few times is all that it takes to get enough soapy lather in my hair. That usually keeps the bar free of hairs too. I then spread the lather through the rest of my hair with my fingers.

The first few times using the shampoo bar, the skin on my fingers puckered up, which was unpleasant. I haven't had that problem since then, so I guess I was just taking longer or using too much of it in the beginning.

dish soap trials

To reduce my plastic usage, I also wanted to stop buying dish washing liquid in plastic bottles.

To make my own, first I tried dissolving grated bar soap in water. I used Kirk's unscented soap. It dissolved but the resulting liquid didn't foam much when used on dishes, and I had to use a lot of the liquid. When there is no foam, I can't tell if the dishes are getting cleaned or not. Foam is important for that reason if for nothing else.

The next time, I tried the same thing with a different kind of soap. It never dissolved completely and the resulting liquid wasn't very soapy either.

There was a good article I read about how SLS (Sodium Lauryl Sulfate) is used in many liquid soaps for creating foam. It or another article also explained why dissolving bar soap in water doesn't work to make liquid soap. I can't find the link(s) right now. If I do, I'll post them.

Many of the recipes I found for making your own liquid dish soap required various liquid ingredients which themselves come in plastic bottles. This recipe didn't have that problem (it includes vinegar, but vinegar can be obtained in glass bottles):
Homemade Liquid Dish Soap

That recipe and the few others I found all required "washing soda" (sodium carbonate). Arm & Hammer sells it in a box. At Walmart I found the shelf where it should be, but it was sold out. Food Lion had it available for $4.79, 59 cents cheaper than Walmart.

I made the recipe but it didn't turn out well. (I wondered if the vinegar and washing soda cancelled each other out, like happens with baking soda.) It was thin and watery, not soapy. After a couple of days it started gelling into a thick liquid, which was interesting. The soap shreds never completely dissolved. When I shook the liquid to help dissolve the soap better, that made it un-gell and get thin again. Over the next days, the same thing kept happening - it gelled; I shook it; it un-gelled.

The liquid sudsed ok both when gelled and thin, but not as good as regular liquid dish soap. It also had a strong scent similar to laundry detergent powder, which seemed out of place for washing dishes. I felt like I had to rinse the dishes extra well to get all the laundry detergent off them. I added essential oil to the mixture, which helped but never completely masked the detergent scent.

After that failure, I tried using bar soap for washing dishes - simply rubbing my dish sponge over the soap bar to lather it up. First, I used Kirk's "Fresh Scent" soap, which didn't smell right for dishes. Then I tried the unscented version, which still didn't smell right. But at least it lathered well and worked well on grease.

Meliora makes a lemon-scented dish soap bar. I considered buying it to try out, but haven't yet done so. It seems expensive. And has to be bought online.

I ended up using another soap I had, orange-scented. It works well on the dishes and smells fine.

At Qiao's house, I'm using a patchouli scented bar soap. I wasn't sure I'd like its scent for dishes, but was pleasantly surprised that I do. This soap is one of a few I bought from an artisan at a Celtic fest in early 2023. When I first removed its wrapper back then, its scent had an unpleasant component to it which I didn't like at all. I left it to air out in the garage for a long long time. I may have even thrown one or two of the soaps out; the scent seemed that bad to me. But now a year and a half later, it smells nice and works great on dishes.

At my house, the soap is sitting on top of a "Scrub Daddy" sponge on the kitchen counter by the sink. At Qiao's, the soap is on the scrubber side of a scrubber sponge (not the same sponge I use for washing dishes). Both work well to keep the soap dry when I'm not using it.