Treehugging Tuesday- SOAP!
A few weeks ago my liveaboard friend Behan left this comment: “In the realm of small things: speaking of fish-friendly detergent, there is this old cruising myth about Joy. Liveaboards / cruisers are supposed to love it “because it gives suds in salt water.” Somehow I don’t think it’s fish friendly, although I can’t point to a reference. And… why the fuss about suds? They’re not necessary to get clean, right? The friendly stuff still seems to work just fine. How on earth- (Earth!) can we get this myth dispelled?”
Truly, eh? We’ve tried to do without petroleum-based soaps for a couple of year now, even off the boat. Now that we’re on the boat, when I pump my sink water overboard every day, I can’t imagine using anything but biodegradable, fish-safe soap. It’s my responsibility to do stuff like that, eh? There was certainly a time, on our old boat, when we indulged in our old friends Joy and Dawn. But in the last two years or so, there are so many choices in the realm of cleaning supplies, it wouldn’t even occur to me to buy the other stuff. So, like Behan asked, why do people do it?
I assume it’s habit. It’s what you’ve always known. I can understand that. You assume the other stuff works better with its rinse agents and sudsing properties. It might, but you’re probably using too much of it anyway. It can be cheaper, certainly. But the best advice someone gave me a while back is to dilute, dilute, dilute. The soap companies want more of your business. Things have become so super-concentrated lately that you can easily replace half the soap bottle with water and still have an effective solution. The same is true of laundry detergents. If your clothes smell strongly of detergent, you’re using more than you need. Half the recommended amount will suffice in most cases. For the same reason you use less with cloth diapers, use less in normal loads. Lots of soap causes it to build up on your clothes. When we first tried Charlie’s Soap- a washing soda-based natural cleaner, they recommended running a few loads of their soap and water through the machine, just to eliminate the nasty detergent residue. Eww. It does wonders for cloth diapers.
Use better stuff, use less, and if you’re a sucker for scents, I can whole-heartedly recommend Seventh Generation’s dish soap and laundry detergent. It smells like something you might actually find in nature, not to mention that it’s made from the good stuff.
And speaking of laundry- here’s the new normal. IKEA octopus with wind blowing down the hatch. Good times.
