Steps – use sunlight soap

This is the first of many posts about steps to sustainability that you can take. Remember small steps + unified action = big results.

Kitchen use

Sunlight soap has many uses, in the kitchen, laundry and for personal use. The major gains using this product are in the packaging and the ingredients. Sunlight soap is packaged in cardboard. If you use it for dishwashing, it will probably replace a liquid detergent in a plastic container. The Skin Deep cosmetic safety database ranks all but one of sunlight soap’s ingredients as 0 to 2 on their hazard score (the hazard score scale is from 0 – no hazard to 10 – high). The only ingredient to score 3 was the yellow colouring. By contrast some ingredients in liquid detergent will probably score 10.

 

I remember my mum using a soap cage to get sunlight soap to lather up. A soap cage has an advantage of using up small scraps of soap (why not use all of the product you buy). I can’t find a source of these soap cages anywhere – if you can help please let me know. Sunlight soap doesn’t lather up very well in hard water.

Laundry and personal use

I also recall my mum using sunlight soap to clean dirt on clothes. Sunlight soap can also be used to shampoo hair.

A product with a story

Sunlight soap is a sustainable product in another way – it has been around since 1884. William Lever produced the soap in cut bars, wrapped and branded it, and sold it in his dad’s grocery shop in Port Sunlight, England. By 1888 they were producing 450 tons a week, spawning the company Level Brothers (later Unilever). According to Wikipedia, Lever Brothers were socially responsible. “Lever Brothers was one of several British companies that took an interest in the welfare of its employees. The model village of Port Sunlight was developed between 1888 and 1914 adjoining the soap factory to accommodate the company’s staff in good quality housing, with high architectural standards and many community facilities”.