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Well, this will be a long post, but hopefully some of you will start looking at this product with little more interest.
First of all, Soap Nuts are NOT a heavy stain remover (but you could use borax, lemon juice or even chemical stain remover to pre treat your stains), so don't be disappointed if your oil and grease stained pants and tee-shirts (from crawling under the boat) don't come out perfectly clean. However, most of the laundry that we do (or I do) is because our clothes, bed sheets, towels etc, are not "fresh" anymore, and for that the product works great (on top of its many more other uses). Also, you do not need fabric softener or the rinse cycle in your laundry (rinse cycle is designed to wash out chemicals in the detergent out of your laundry).
Look at it from different prospective. All of the commercial cleaning products have to be manufactured. All the components of those products (all the chemicals that go inside those cleaning products) need to be either mined or manufactured. Now, think about the pollution created during all of this manufacturing process and about all the energy that is used. I don't have any numbers, but I do remember reading somewhere that to produce 1kg/1l of cleaning detergent requires something like 10 000 gallons of water - this includes everything from logging trees for the cardboard packaging boxes, extracting and refining oil for production of plastic bottles (and the detergents itself), transportation involved with all of that, and finally manufacturing of the cleaning detergent itself.
In North America alone, over 1500 loads of laundry are started every second, that means over 600 million pounds of laundry detergent is used every year !
Now, since Soap nuts/berries grow on trees, during the "manufacturing" process CO2 is consumed and Oxygen is produced. Local people pick them, dry them out on the sun, and they are ready to use. So the only energy and pollution footprint comes from the need of transportation.
Now, I use them for washing my hunting clothes ( whether at home in the washing machine or on moose trips in the stream) and they work absolutely great at cleaning and removing all odours.
Fireball, weather you buy them from me or someone else doesn't really matter ( however, for me this is about making a difference, and not just about making money by selling the product. I have try talking about it on Ontario Out Of Doors forum, but my posts got deleted by the "moderator" , and I was told that I have to pay for advertising of the product...)
The bottom line is that we use different products for different things, and not everything works the same for everyone. Soap nuts can replace many chemically based product that we use every day, but the choices to use them are ours.
Max.
Here are couple of interesting things.
First one is the bottom of the page from MSDS sheet for TIDE detergent:
"This MSDS is intended to provide a brief summary of our knowledge and guidance regarding the
use of this material. The information contained here has been compiled from sources considered
by Procter & Gamble to be dependable and is accurate to the best of the Company’s knowledge. It
is not meant to be an all-inclusive document on worldwide hazard communication regulations.
This information is offered in good faith. Each user of this material needs to evaluate the
conditions of use and design the appropriate protective mechanisms to prevent employee
exposures, property damage or release to the environment. Procter & Gamble assumes no
responsibility for injury to the recipient or third persons, or for any damage to any property
resulting from misuse of the product."
And this one shows you how tricky some companies are:
CBC News
"Some laundry detergents boasting to be 'green' products still contain concentrations of petrochemicals, according to a CBC News investigation.
Of the three most popular brands - Clorox GreenWorks, Purex Natural Elements and Sunlight Green Clean - both Purex and Sunlight's products were found to contain petrochemicals, despite their 'green' claims
CBC News commissioned an independent lab to analyze the three detergents.
Sunlight Green Clean says it "includes" plant-based ingredients in its detergent and that they have "found a more eco-conscious alternative to just petro-chemical surfactants."
But a test on their product found that along with plant-based ingredients, 38 per cent of their detergent content comes from petroleum.
"The first fishy thing on this label is the word "includes," said Adria Vasil, author of the book Ecoholic Home. "Basically, that's your tipoff that the whole thing isn't plant based."
A test on Purex Natural Elements, which also claims to be "naturally sourced" and "95 per cent natural", revealed that 30 per cent of its ingredients come from petroleum.
However a test on Clorox revealed that 98 per cent of its ingredients are plant-based.
"This tells me that they've actually done the testing and they're willing to be transparent with their consumers," Vasil said.
Both Purex and Sunlight defended their products.
Henkel, the makers of Purex, said in a statement that: "the 95 per cent natural claim is calculated based on all of the ingredients in the detergent including cleaning agents, water, and fragrance ingredients."
It said that the U.S. Department of Agriculture allows any laundry detergent with 34 per cent or more of bio-based carbon content to be categorized as a bio-preferred product and that the 62 per cent in Sunlight Green Clean significantly exceeds that.
"We made a positive decision in the development of Sunlight Green Clean to produce a laundry detergent that contained significantly more plant based than petroleum based surfactant, but not to sacrifice cleaning performance."
But Vasil said companies are simply taking advantage of a lack of regulation.
"It's basically an indication that the government needs to step in and say we cannot allow misleading labeling to continue because it's basically duping the consumer."
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