Category: Getting Rid of Toxicity in Your Home

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Bar Soap & Why It’s Better than Liquid Soap

Last updated on October 23, 2022.

Bar soap is often plastic free, less expensive than liquid soap, and usually has safer ingredients. Photo by silviarita on Pixabay
Bar soap is often plastic free, less expensive than liquid soap, and usually has safer ingredients. Photo by silviarita on Pixabay.

Bar Soap is usually plastic-free

Switching to bar soap is one big change you can make right away to avoid plastic waste. It also embraces the zero-waste effort! Stop buying liquid soap that comes in plastic bottles, even the large refill bottles. Those bottles are recyclable but please know that recycling isn’t what we think it is. If those items make it to the recycling center, they will be down-cycled (the chemical composition of plastic changes when heated) and cannot be a soap bottle again. Also, only about 9% of plastics are actually recycled. So the answer is almost always to refuse plastic. Just stay away from it.

Unfortunately, many soaps at local supermarkets are plastic wrapped. I try to only buy brands that have no plastic packaging for hand soap, body bars, and shampoo. Plastic packaging for these just isn’t necessary.

There are many bar soap choices, but most are wrapped in plastic. There's really no need for this.
There are many bar soap choices, but most are wrapped in plastic. There’s really no need for this. Photo by Marie Cullis.
Photos by Marie Cullis.

Microbeads in body wash (liquid soap)

If you are or were using body wash with “exfoliating” features, please know that what you were most likely using to scrub your skin was little, tiny plastic beads. And those beads are now found in the ocean and the Great Lakes.1 When microbeads go down the drain, they pass unfiltered through sewage treatment plants and end up in rivers and canals, and eventually the ocean. The Microbead-Free Waters Act of 2015 was passed in December 2015, and it amended the “Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act to ban rinse-off cosmetics that contain intentionally-added plastic microbeads beginning on January 1, 2018, and to ban the manufacturing of these cosmetics beginning on July 1, 2017. These bans are delayed by one year for cosmetics that are over-the-counter drugs.”2 It was a fight to get rid of them, so congrats to everyone who contributed to that cause!

Is bar soap hygienic?

Yes.

Some believe that bar soap is less hygienic than liquid soap. Large companies have promoted this myth to consumers in order to make a higher profit. But bar soap is clean and safe. The fact is, most liquid soap dispensers, in the places your fingers and hands touch, are not clean. Think about that – do you sanitize your dispensers? If you do, congratulations on being so hygienic! But public restroom soap dispensers are often not sanitary. Have you ever noticed that most hotels provide bar soap and not liquid soap in the rooms? I imagine that has a lot more to do with cost than sanitation, but I’ll give them credit for both! I’ve also read that hotels take the leftover bar soap and melt it down to remake it into new soap bars.

The questions about germs on bar soap are common, but most articles I’ve found indicate that the risk is low, and perhaps lower than liquid soap in a dispenser. Many articles and posts cite a 1988 study done by the Dial Corporation, which found that bacteria did not spread through washing with bar soap.3 But sometimes companies drive profit up through fear. Regardless of that study, many companies encouraged the idea that using liquid soap was more hygienic and sanitary, and the idea stuck.

“Liquid soap requires about five times more energy to produce than a bar of soap, and it is almost always sold in a plastic bottle.” -Brigette Allen and Christine Wong, authors of Living Without Plastic: More Than 100 Easy Swaps for Home4

Take care of your bar soap

So make the switch. But take care of your bar soap. First, let your bar soap dry in the open (as opposed to a closed soap dish). Second, if the soap is moist, run the bar under the water for a few seconds to rinse off the outside “slime.” Third, if you are sharing bar soap, you’re likely only sharing it with family members, and you share many microorganisms with them anyway. Last, if you are washing your hands the right way and for the amount of time you’re supposed to, you’re washing any residual germs away anyway.

Image of bar soap, Photo by Paul Gaudriault on Unsplash
Photo by Paul Gaudriault on Unsplash.

Cost

Bar soap is significantly less expensive when compared to liquid soap because the amount of uses from bar soap is higher than with liquid soap. It just lasts longer. With liquid soap, you’re paying for the water in it, and you get less use than with a bar. We have saved money by switching to bar soap.

Safe Ingredients

There are many bad ingredients in soaps, both bar and liquid. But they seem to be more prevalent in liquid soaps. Always check products through the Environmental Working Group‘s (EWG) website. They are a non-profit dedicated to being a consumer advocate, testing and reviewing products so that people can look up and understand what’s really in their products. They have guides to cosmetics, sunscreens, cleaners, food, personal care products, and even tap water! They’ll be able to show you what ingredients are really in many major products.

DIY

You can even make your own bar soap, any shape or color you want! Photo by pixel2013 on Pixabay
You can even make your own bar soap, any shape or color you want! Photo by pixel2013 on Pixabay.

Although I have not ventured into soap-making much, there are hundreds of ideas online for DIY soap. Making your own soap could be a new hobby, a family project, or a challenge among friends to see who makes the best soaps. Get your creativity on with different shapes, scents, and colors. I imagine Pinterest is bursting with ideas on soap-making!

I hope this post has been helpful to you. If you have questions or ideas, I’d love to hear them! Please leave me a comment below! Thank you for reading and please share and subscribe!

 

Additional Resource:

Article, “Solid Plastic-Free Shower Gel and Body Wash? What Do You Think?’ myplasticfreelife.com, June 3, 2018.

Footnotes:

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Death of a Plastic Shower Curtain, Part 1

Last updated on February 13, 2022.

Torn plastic shower curtain.
This plastic shower curtain liner is beyond repair. Photo by Marie Cullis.

Recently, my plastic shower curtain bit the dust – it’s beyond repair now. My family moved into our house about 3 years ago, and at the time, although I’d always been a huge recycler and I was environmentally conscious, I didn’t really KNOW about the scale of the plastic problem yet. So this was the plastic shower curtain liner we purchased – a standard PEVA (polyethylene vinyl acetate) liner that is found in many homes because of its low cost and effectiveness. It had that new plastic smell that we have all come to associate with new and clean. This was before I knew that that smell was actually the off-gassing of toxins, such as phthalates, toluene, ethylbenzene, phenol, methyl isobutyl ketone, xylene, acetophenone, and cumene. Yuck, what are all of those things? At the time, I didn’t understand what those chemicals were, but I found that research indicated that they are harmful to human health.

“That smell, the one that comes pouring out of the package when you open it, is a plume of toxic gases that have built up while the item was sitting on the shelf.”-Michael SanClements, author of Plastic Purge1

Mold and repairs

This plastic shower curtain grew mildew and mold consistently! Gross. We have an old house and there is no ventilation in the bathroom, so that’s part of the problem. Over the years, I cleaned it with bleach, Comet, vinegar, Borax, and laundry detergents. All of those worked to clean the curtain temporarily. I’ve even put the whole thing in the washing machine on a casual cycle. But the mildew/mold always came back.

Plastic shower curtains split and break too, and we repaired it over and over again (Beth Terry at myplasticfreelife.com always writes that repairing something as much as possible to extend the life of an item is a great way to reduce waste). The shower curtain had new hole punches, plastic tape, and even staples from different repairs over time. So last week, I put it in the washing machine to clean it again…and it fell apart. It had such large holes and tears that I could no longer tape it together. It is a dead shower curtain. Frankly, I’m ready to get something plastic-free anyway.

Chemicals in Plastic/Vinyl Shower Curtains

In 2008, the Center for Health, Environment and Justice released a study after testing PVC shower curtains purchased at big box retailers. “All of the curtains contained cancer-causing volatile organic compounds [VOCs], phthalates, organotins (nervous system toxicants) and one or more of the heavy metals lead, cadmium, mercury and chromium.”2 As many as 108 VOCs can be emitted from a PVC shower curtain.

Though newer plastic shower curtain liners are supposedly less toxic, because of reports like that, there are still two major problems with them. First, I can still smell that SMELL. Since I don’t really know what my family is breathing and smelling from a potentially new plastic/vinyl shower curtain, I’d just rather avoid it. Second, it is made of PLASTIC! Call it vinyl, call it PEVA, call it whatever you’d like – but the fact is, is that it is a plastic product with no recyclability or afterlife use. [Side note: an undamaged old shower curtain could potentially be used as a drop cloth when painting or doing other tasks where you don’t want to damage or litter the floor. But then it still will have to be discarded at some point.]

Photo of a bathroom shower with a blue and white curtain.
Photo by House Method on Unsplash.

So what are the alternatives?

The alternatives are organic cotton, hemp, and linen – all cloth materials. Hemp is evidently mold-resistant, so that’s the type I will most likely buy someday. On a discussion board at myplasticfreelife.com, a guest suggested rubbing beeswax on a cloth curtain to repel water and mold.3 I’ve also seen shower curtains made out of recycled sailcloth on sites like Etsy and Second Wind Sails. These are cool and something I’d like to try someday, but they are expensive.

Since the dead shower curtain liner was actually just a liner for us, I’m going to simply keep using the fabric shower curtain that I already have and hope that it doesn’t get ruined. I am seriously considering trying the beeswax method. If I do, I promise to update this article! (Please read my update here.)

What are your ideas to replace a plastic shower curtain, or what have you tried? I would love to know – please leave me a comment below!

 

Additional Resource:

Article, Volatile Vinyl: The New Shower Curtain’s Chemical Smell,” Center for Health, Environment and Justice, June 2008.

Footnotes: