I keep meaning to make laundry soap, ever since I started doing my laundry greener on Good Human Day 31 I have had it as a goal. And I even bought the supplies to make it randomly one day about 2-3 weeks ago, but life gets in the way of good intentions sometimes and I had still not made the soap, well...until today that is! And it was way easier than I expected it to be, which is one of the reasons I kept putting it off. Minus a little extra time I spent grating a type of soap that many sites recommended (Fels Naptha), that after opening I found was just not for me, the process only took like 5 minutes to make a batch that should last me for 60 loads of laundry!
Here is the recipe I used from a site called DIY Natural:
*I used Ivory soap and added a few drops of my natural Citrus Bliss and Purify doTERRA essential oils for their fragrance and natural purifying properties to our batch.*
Natural Laundry Soap Recipe:
Each batch yields approximately 32 ounces (between 32-64 loads based on how many Tsp used per load).
- 1 bar of shaved bar soap (Ivory, ZOTE, Fels-Naptha)
- 1 cup of borax
- 1 cup of washing soda
Finely grate a bar soap with a citrus zester or use a larger grater then run the blade in your food processor that turns it into "powder." It won't be quite as fine as real powdered soap, but very close. Then add one cup of Borax and one cup of washing soda and thoroughly stir together for 5 minutes you can also put the borax and washing soda into the food processor after you "powder" the soap and blend it that way much quicker. It only take TWO TEASPOONS to do a large load. The hardest part is thinking that two teaspoons will do the job, but it does!
And here is a small bit of info on why store bought detergents are not the greatest from a site called Natural Healthezine:
The mineral salts in water will react with soap to produce an insoluble precipitate that will not rinse away. It is more commonly known as soap scum and you can see it as a bath tub ring or a ring inside of your washing machine. This precipitate will settle into fabrics making them stiff and more likely to attract dirt. The water softener added to the detergent prevents the mineral salts (mostly magnesium and calcium) from bonding with the soap and forming that film.
Detergents with brighteners do not get your clothes any cleaner than detergents without. By converting ultraviolet light wavelengths to visible blue light, these chemicals simply trick the eye into thinking that the clothes are whiter. Since brighteners only work if left on the fabrics, clothes washed in these detergents will come out of the machine with a chemical residue left on them.
The fragrances found in commercially prepared laundry detergents are solely to make your clothes smell better. These are all chemically derived.
In commercially prepared detergents all of these ingredients are chemicals that are slow to degrade, if at all, and are known to cause allergies and skin and eye irritations in sensitive individuals. Some are toxic to the environment. Therefore, folks with a green conscience are turning to making their own cleaning products, especially those that come into contact with the body, like laundry detergent.
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| The 3 ingredients and the finished Laundry Soap |
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