diy liquid soap from bar soap
grate a single 4oz bar of your favorite soap
slowly add the grated soap to the water, stirring constantly
stir well, until soap is completely dissolved
let cool, stirring occasionally to prevent it from setting up
using a funnel**, pour an appropriate amount into a liquid hand soap dispenser, to use in the kitchen or bathroom
store the rest in a well-cleaned gallon milk jug
congrats, you’ve made a gallon of perfectly good hand soap! i made a gallon of this soap at the beginning of the year, and at this rate it’ll last me well into next year. it’s a fraction of the cost of store-bought, and it uses a fraction of the packaging too, meaning less waste! this also cuts down on the carbon emissions of shipping (any time you buy a liquid product, most of the weight & volume is just water, making it unnecessarily bulky and heavy to transport. if you can buy a dehydrated, solid, or powdered version, you should.)
*a gallon per bar has given me a pretty thick and gelatinous liquid soap. you may be able to get away with more water if you’d prefer a runnier soap. the consistency may also depend on what kind of bar soap you start with
**if you don’t have a kitchen funnel, i highly recommend getting both a small-spouted one for pouring into very narrow bottles and a wide-spouted canning funnel for jars. the latter has been probably the most unexpectedly useful kitchen accessory i’ve ever gotten.
(originally inspired by this post, but this blogger is a big fan of essential oils and i have tweaked the recipe a hair & added my own notes, so i wanted to make my own post. here’s a list of other personal sustainability projects i’ve done. as always, any individual attempts to mitigate climate change are futile due to the scale of the problem, but it doesn’t hurt to make small lifestyle changes, and it’s good practice for eventually living in the solarpunk world we need)