Belated Earth Day Post! Save Money and Help the Environment

Reducing your impact on the environment isn't just some Hippy dream or agenda to turn us all into vegan bark-eaters. While I'm not denying a lot of Progressives seem focused entirely on the environment to the detriment of other important issues such as Human Rights and Social Equality, I would like to point out that some of their ideas and approaches can be beneficial to your budget, help the environment, and do damage to the heartless corporations and oligarchs which currently rule our country. As this blog is for Labor and other Human Rights issues, I've been slowly illustrating ways you can save money at home (benefit to the individual) and, in doing so deprive corporations of their life-blood -- your hard-earned cash (benefit to the country).

To that end, you can easily make your own laundry detergent in your own kitchen.  I made my own yesterday and it only took about 30 minutes (tops) to do -- and that was only because I was making my daughter lunch at the same time!  The recipe I used only has 4 ingredients:  Fels-Naptha® (Ivory soap can also be used), Borax, washing soda, and water.  With the exception of the water, all these ingredients are probably in the laundry isle of your local supermarket.  Combined, the ingredients cost me about $9 after tax.  "But that's not cheap!" you're probably shouting at your screen.  Hold on.  The recipe only uses ½ of the bar of Fels-Naptha®, 1 cup of Borax, and one cup of washing soda.  When these volumes are considered, the cost per batch is reduced to about $1.70!  Frugal eh?  Where are you going to find laundry detergent for that price? 

What would you do if I told you that it costs $1.70 to make not 1, not 3, but 5 GALLONS of laundry detergent!

Now are you interested?  Now, go out and get yourself a 5 gallon bucket (around $2 from a hardware store).

Here's the recipe:

1. In a saucepan or pot, grate ½ of the Fels-Naptha® bar and top off with water -- filling the saucepan.  Don't worry, you won't ruin your pot or poison your kids, this stuff is only soap and less harmful than the stuff you use to wash it normally.
2. Heat the water at medium-high and stir every so often to help melt the soap.  This will probably take about 15 minutes.
3. Fill up your 5 gallon bucket with hot water from the tap leaving some room for the melted soap mixture.  I did this in my bathtub.
4. To the water in the bucket, add 1 cup of Borax and 1 cup of washing soda, and stir.
5. When the soap has completely melted in the saucepan, pour the mixture into the 5 gallon bucket and stir.
6. That's it.  You've made liquid laundry soap.  However, it does need to cool so wait overnight or so.  You'll find the liquid soap has congealed a bit.
7. Once cooled, mix up the liquid soap and pour into what ever smaller vessels you may have laying about.  I used my old laundry detergent container, gallon milk jugs, an empty shampoo bottle....

When you do your laundry, use ¾ a cup per load.  When you do the math, the cost of soap per load for your new, environmentally safer liquid laundry soap will be somewhere between 1 and 2¢!  Beat that!  The savings can go into your bank account and stay away from greedy corporations and their plutocratic overlords.  On top of that, your liquid laundry soap isn't being transported from some factory (reducing carbon emissions), adding phosphates to the environment, encouraging the abuse of petrochemicals (whether in the manufacture of the detergent or its container), and reducing landfill waste (you're reusing containers you would probably throw away).

There you have it:  good for your bottom dollar, good for the environment, and bad for greedy bastards.