Now we get to talk about laundry detergent.
Say what? What's wrong with my laundry detergent?
In short, everything is wrong with your commercial laundry detergent.Going back to why we started our company it was laundry detergent. Skin is our largest organ. It absorbs stuff into your bloodstream and frequently people don't even consider that the detergent and/or fabric softener is full of all sorts of crap that your skin sucks in. The other factor we often don't even consider is what happens to the water that gets washed down the drain? That water is full of all the stuff in the detergent, the softener, and all of the stuff you are washing out of your clothes. Have you ever thought about what all of that does to the environment?
We didn't either until...well, until we did. And then the questions began. Then research. Then the actual making. That was at least six (6) years ago and we have never looked back.
So, have you ever looked at the ingredients on your laundry soap, wait you can't. They aren't printed on the packaging. You actually have to go search it out on the company website and look through the MSDS (material safety data sheets) sheets.
What? STOP ALL THIS INSANITY!
As I was doing some additional research for this post I pulled up ingredient lists to the most popular laundry detergent, as well as, several 'natural' brands and that one detergent all new parents use (SLS really). I thought about linking to them, but you know what I don't want to give them any extra traffic.
What the hell are those words. What do they do. Why do you need them? Ugh. I could go on. You know what? They are filled with so much junk. Junk you don't need. Junk fishies and froggies don't need either.
Here are just a few of the ingredients listed and what they say they do:
Ingredient: What they say it does:
- ethanol process aid
- alcohol sulfate surfractant
- linear alkylbenzene sulfonate surfractant
- sodium laureth sulfate surfractant
- silicone suds supressant
- polyethylene glycol 4000 process aid
WHY???
Earlier I mentioned this is pretty much why we started this journey. While over the years we have dabbled with several versions of laundry detergent, but in the most simple, the most pure, our detergent has just three (3) ingredients:
- sodium carbonate
- sodium borate
- castile soap (our unscented plain jane soap)
