Soapnuts

September 21, 2008 – 8:27 pm

No? Well they are amazing little things that could potentially change your life completely making buying washing powder amongst other things, a thing of the past, and saving you a chunk of money into the bargain!

The Soapnut or Soapberry is the common name for fruit of the Sapindus which is a species of trees and shrubs that grow naturally in places like India. They can be grown in the western hemisphere too, and the seed that they produce contains a substance called saponin. Saponin is a natural detergent which can be used to clean clothes and other things.

Soapnuts have become popular among people who are trying to be more environmentally friendly as they are a great way of cleaning things without using chemical detergents. They’re safe for washing pretty much any fabric including delicate things like wool and silk, and they’re great for people who have skin conditions like Eczema because they don’t contain any man made chemicals that inflame the skin and cause a flare up of the condition.

To use them is very simple as well meaning that pretty much anyone can use them without finding it any harder than washing with powder or tablets. You buy bags of soapnut shells and you place a few (4-8 normally) half shells in a small cotton drawstring bag. You then pop the bag in the drum of the washing machine with your clothes and then wash as normal – dead easy! Another advantage of washing clothing with them is that you don’t need fabric softener. When you use a chemical soap like washing powder, the chemicals in the powder cause the fabric to become harder, because soapnuts don’t have these chemicals in them, they leave material soft as it should be. You can still wash at low temperatures too.

When the load of washing is done, you take the little bag, hang it on the line with the soapnuts still in it, and leave them to dry. When they’re dry you give them a little squeeze and as long as they are still firm and not soggy feeling, then they still contain some saponin and you can use them again for another wash. If you squeeze them and they feel softer then you just open up the bag, throw the nut shells on the compost, and pop some fresh ones in. Generally speaking you can usually get 4-6 washes out of one set of soapnuts depending on things like the water hardness in your area. (Soft water areas tend to get more goes per set of nut shells). If you like your washing scented, then it’s very simple to do this as well, just pop a couple of drops of pure essential oil into the fabric softener drawer of your washing machine and it will scent your clothes.

Soapnut shells can be used for various other things as well as washing clothes. You can create a liquid from them to make a soap that can be used to wash the car, shampoo your pets, clean your work surfaces & carpets, and you can even use the liquid as a soap and shampoo on yourself, however if you do this, do be careful not to get it in your eyes as it really does sting quite thoroughly!

People have tried various different ways of creating a liquid from the shells, from just boiling them up in a little water and straining them, to liquidising the boiled mixture (be careful doing this as it does foam a LOT!), to even fermenting them on their own and with other ingredients to make a stronger cleaning solution. Really, once you’ve bought some, pretty much everyone I know has found it interesting to try and see what other uses they can find for them.

The other really HUGE advantage of soapnuts of course is that they are a lot cheaper to use than washing powder. You can buy them for around £4 for 200g on the internet, paying less if you buy them in larger quantities. A 200 gram bag of them will do you around 150 washes if you base it on using six half shells at a time and doing four loads of washing with them before they need composting. That’s around two and a half pence per load of washing!

Read the soapnut thread in the forum

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Composting

June 9, 2008 – 5:17 pm

Composting sounds hard, but it’s really not, in fact it’s one of the easiest things you can do at home to get you started on the path to being greener.  There are a few things to decide before you get started, and one or two things to remember as you go along, but after that, it’s really a matter of throw things in and leave them to rot.

First thing you have to decide is if you want a regular compost heap or if you’re going to go for a wormery or a bokashi compost.  A regular compost heap can have all your uncooked fruit and veg added, along with any garden waste you get - weeds, grass cuttings, prunings from plants and trees etc.  A bokashi compost means you can add cooked food waste including meat as well as all the normal things.  However, with a bokashi set up, you have to buy your bokashi powder and remember to add it regularly.  A wormery is generally much smaller and good if you’ve only got a very small space like a yard rather than a garden, as it tends not to smell and so doesn’t matter if it’s right by the back door.

Once you’ve made your decision which you’re going to go for, then you need to decide where you’re going to place it.  Remember with a bokashi set up you get a liquid forming that means you want to set it up on something (a bit like you would with a waterbutt) so you can pop a bucket or watering can under the tap to let you use all that lovely juice for feeding your plants.  With a compost heap you want to put it a little out of the way from the back door ideally as they can get a little smelly although if you buy one of the plastic composting bins then these tend to keep the smells inside much more than an open heap does.

So, you’ve placed your compost heap where you want it, and now all you have to do is add things to it.  For a regular compost heap, you can include:

Grass cuttings (a little at a time mixed with other things is best)
Hedge clippings (avoid putting rose leaves in unless they look totally healthy)
uncooked fruit and veg peelings and offcuts
weeds (except for perennial weeds like dandelions and bindweed - also best to avoid weeds that have gone to seed)
vacuum contents
hair from your hairbrush
hair from your pets
cardboard
newspaper
eggshells

For a bokashi compost you can include all of the above plus any other food waste you produce in the kitchen including raw meat, cooked meat and cooked fruit and veg and dairy etc. (all the things you’d normally have to leave out in other words!).

For a wormery you can add all the same things as are in a regular compost, but in smaller quantity.

If your compost is too moist try adding a bit more brown matter - dried leaves, card and paper etc.  If your compost seems too dry try adding more wet contents - peelings and green prunings etc.   If your compost doesn’t seem to be breaking down very fast you can add something called an activator.  Activators come in all sorts of different forms, but basically they’re things that are rich in nitrogen and help speed the process up.  Urine is a good activator as is nettle liquid which you can make by putting about 100g of nettle leaves into about 1 litre of water and leaving for a couple of weeks in a lidded bucket.  Or you can just add the nettle leaves to the heap, but that’s not as fast as making the liquid with them first.

Over time your garden and kitchen waste will rot down in the compost bin or wormery and become lovely rich compost to use on your garden.  When it does, you can scoop it out and store it in sacks till you want it.

Happy composting!

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Cutting Down On Waste

May 30, 2008 – 9:30 pm

I’ve recently been working on cutting down the amount of waste I create.  One major way of doing this is to cut down on the waste that I bring into the house in the first place.

I started this by going through the post I recieve, even the junk mail, and every time something comes through which I don’t want to recieve again, I contact the people who sent it, and tell them to remove my details from their mailing list.  In this way I’ve substantially cut down on the amount of junk mail, brochures, catalogues etc. that come through my door and end up virtually straight in the bin or the recycling bag.  Obviously most of what I’m cutting down on is paper, but there are all the windows from window envelopes and plastic wrappers from catalogues and magazines etc. as well.  I’ve put up a sticker on my letterbox to say I don’t want to recieve any unsolicited mail or advertising too, so no more ‘free’ local paper - well I rarely looked at it, and no more leaflets put through with the post in the morning either - again 99% of the time I didn’t do more than glance at them.

My other big way of cutting down the waste that comes in to my home is to look at what I am buying when I do my weekly shop.  It’s been my practice for a while now to get my fruit and veg loose, and to bake my bread at home so I’ve already eliminated bread wrappers fruit nets and veg bags from my shopping (flour, sugar, and oil can all be bought in recyclable containers, and salt and dried yeast I buy in bulk so as to create as little waste as possible), so what else could I look at.  I did my regular weekly shop, and then when I got home I looked at it closely and decided what had to change. 

Meat was the first area where there was a lot of waste, all those prepackaged bits of meat from the supermarket that sat in plastic trays or worse still in polystyrene trays with plastic wrap around them. 

So change one… Buy my meat from the butcher to try to eliminate a lot of the packaging. This worked really well, even to the point of me taking along my own containers and getting the butcher to put my Chicken, Mince, Pork Chops etc. into my own containers as he went instead of bags so I can just get them home and throw them in the freezer as they are.  Zero waste achieved!

Cold meat and cheese was the other area where there seemed to be more waste than I thought was reasonable, so how to deal with this… Delicatessen’s aren’t easy to come by in my town sadly (If you have one locally, shout for joy, hug the owner and buy from them to make sure they don’t go out of business, you’re very lucky!).  There are however delicatessen counters in most of the larger supermarkets here.  The biggest problem I encountered here was a total lack of understanding on the part of the people working the counters, and the managers of the shops. 

Change two… I decided to try taking my own tubs in when I went and asking them to put the sliced cold meat, and the lumps of cheese into these containers rather than wrapping them in their plastic sheets and then bagging them.  This met with some rather odd reactions.  Most of the counters near me look at me oddly, but do as I ask, even if they secretly think I’m cuckoo so again zero waste achieved here too!  One or two however have refused point blank and made me have to call on management to try to get them to see that there is not a problem with putting my meat or cheese into my tubs and then sticking their price label onto the lid.   The worst store I had a manager who also refused to see any sense - apparently in that store, the staff HAVE to use pieces of plastic because it’s their store policy that they don’t touch the produce with their hands. (And they don’t use gloves because…?!) - eerrrr yeah ok and they think I’m cuckoo?!  

Overall it’s been successful though, and I’m now producing less waste because I’m bringing less in.  I’ve still got to figure out how to cut out the non-recyclable packaging on a few items, plasticised paper that cereal comes in - as well as a box!  I still can’t work that out, why on earth do I need both for goodness sake.  The few frozen items I still buy also come in plastic bags like peas - I could buy tinned, which would mean that the container would be recyclable, but they just don’t taste the same to me.  Tea is another issue, I can only drink decaf, and whether I buy loose leaf, or teabags locally I seem to have to buy them in a box which comes wrapped in plastic to seal it. 

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Going Green in the Bathroom

May 24, 2008 – 2:48 pm

Stand in your bathroom and just take a look at what you see there.  Shampoo, soap, toothpaste, maybe some makeup, body lotion, cleanser, toner, some cleaning products, toilet roll sanitary products, all the normal things you could expect to see in a bathroom.  But how green are they?  Could they be greener?

Like most people, I don’t want to live in a world without nice products to clean my face with, I want toothpaste and soft toilet paper.  I even want some fancy smellies to put in my bath on occasion.  However, I want to have all these things AND be green.  So can it be done?

Yes it can, it’s not as easy as it should be, and the more of us who demand eco friendly products, the easier it should get.  At the moment walking into your local supermarket or chemist and buying things along with your everyday shop isn’t always possible yet, but I’m sure with a little pressure from us, the consumer, it will be.

Brands such as Lavera, Lush & Logona who make facial, body & bath products, Moom who do a range of natural hair removal items, and Natracare who make natural tampons and towels (as well as nappies), are going a long way towards making it possible for the modern home to be stocked with all the goodies you’d expect to find in a bathroom, and still be green.  Add to these, environmentally (and people) friendly shampoos, conditioners, hair dye and hair styling products that are all becoming available and all you have to think about is which one you want to use. 

Where can all these things be bought?  Well a few places you could look are:
Lush
Spirit of Nature
Lavera
Ethical Superstore
Naturally Thinking
Forest Soap Factory
Nigels Eco Store
Cellande
Fresh Face Cosmetics
Calm N Comfy
These are by no means all the online stores that sell this sort of product, but just a few of the many that are out there.   

Prices vary a lot – just as they do with non eco friendly varieties of the same products, so you’ll have to evaluate which ones are best for you and in terms of value for money, but it is nice to know there is a choice.  One thing I always try to remember is that I could well be not only extending the life of the planet, but my life also by using less chemicals on my body, so even if something does cost me a few pence more (and many of them don’t cost any more anyway), then I think it’s worth it.

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