Showering with Soap or Shower Gel ?

ethelhead

Lesley_Gaye wrote: »

not using soap etc is fine, I have done that now for 35 years or so

and soap products are very drying to the skin, which then promotes the waste of further resources on moisturisers etc...

i'm in agreement with the moneyless man, Mark Boyle on this one, as iirc he reckons that the soapless option is more viable if you have a balanced organic wholefood veggie/vegan diet. Meat & over processed foods = whiffyness, as our bodies have to deal with & expel all the nasties.

valk_scot

Just to chip in on this...I do know I can use a fair amount of "grey" water in my garden if we've only been using soap products and this does no harm to the plants. But if you use detergents ie washing up liquid, washing powder, shampoo and shower gel then you shouldn't use much of the resultant grey water on crop plants. I'll bail out the bath if we've only used a bar of soap to wash in it, but I won't do the same with bubble bath water. So I'd hazard an opinion that soap is less damaging to plant life than detergent.

We don't use shower gel anyway, just soap. OH is a sensitive bunny and gets itchy when it comes to many toiletries etc so I just buy Palmolive soap for the shower. I get dry skin from hand washes and body wash and prefer soap. DD gets the odd box of smellies and bath bombs of course but mostly, it's Palmolive for her too. Four bars for £1 out of Superdrug, it doesn't tend to mush and the smell reminds me of when I was little. What's not to like?

Ben84

valk_scot wrote: »

Just to chip in on this...I do know I can use a fair amount of "grey" water in my garden if we've only been using soap products and this does no harm to the plants. But if you use detergents ie washing up liquid, washing powder, shampoo and shower gel then you shouldn't use much of the resultant grey water on crop plants. I'll bail out the bath if we've only used a bar of soap to wash in it, but I won't do the same with bubble bath water. So I'd hazard an opinion that soap is less damaging to plant life than detergent.

We don't use shower gel anyway, just soap. OH is a sensitive bunny and gets itchy when it comes to many toiletries etc so I just buy Palmolive soap for the shower. I get dry skin from hand washes and body wash and prefer soap. DD gets the odd box of smellies and bath bombs of course but mostly, it's Palmolive for her too. Four bars for £1 out of Superdrug, it doesn't tend to mush and the smell reminds me of when I was little. What's not to like?

A lot of detergent products like washing up liquid and washing powder contain salt, exactly the same as you'd use in cooking, but unfortunately reasonably toxic to most plants.

Detergent compounds themselves come in a huge range of different types, some biodegrade much faster than ordinary soap, while others never biodegdrade (not commonly used in household products any more). I'm only considering the active cleaning compounds, not the many extra ingredients added to these products that each have their own specific environmental profiles. It's impossible to compare soap to detergent in such broad terms.

In more general terms however, to consider the products as a whole, most bar soaps have in recent years become complex mixtures of ingredients, colours, perfumes, and performance boosting additives like EDTA that are known to pollute the environment long term - well a by-product of its degradation is a persistent pollutant. I'm not greatly convinced there's a huge difference for the environment between typical modern bar soaps and shower gels once they've gone down the drain. The raw materials for both are also nearly always palm oil, the production of which is now the major cause of rainforest deforestation.

Getting clean doesn't seem to be very environmentally friendly and I don't have any great answers to it either, but I do try to buy low packaging items and use them sparingly.