Why Biodegradable Laundry Soap?

After we began washing our clothes with this beauty, my skin took a turn for the worse.  It was pretty obvious why:  I was exposing my skin to heaps of nasty chemicals 24/7 because I didn’t look into our detergent purchase.  I just grabbed some Persil (like Tide or Cheer) off the shelf and raced home with visions of clean clothes.

Detergent companies aren’t required to list the ingredients in their products.  As a result, most laundry detergents are chemically enhanced with cleaning agents and scents made of things we’ve never heard of.  This is a huge problem because:

  1. All those chemicals get in your clothes.  You wear your clothes all day, and your skin absorbs all that nasty mystery stuff.
  2. All those chemicals in the washer go directly into the water supply.

It’s a double dose of bad.

If you use these products every day, your skin doesn’t know any better.  But if you use something mild and then switch to a regular detergent like we did, your body won’t be happy.  It’s like giving someone a double espresso.  If he drinks that much every day, no big deal, right?  And what happens to the person who never drinks coffee?  Yow.  He has a huge reaction to that caffeine.

So how should you find a better detergent?

Here are the things we do in our search for mild, biodegradable soaps:

  1. Read the label. If there isn’t an ingredient list, my thought isn’t that they don’t want you to know their secret formula.  It’s that they don’t want you to know the scary stuff going into their product and against your skin.  We veto any detergent without an ingredient list.
  2. Look at how many ingredients are listed.  There shouldn’t be a lot.  Do you recognize them?
  3. Smell it. Have you ever walked into the detergent section of places like WalMart and felt your eyes start to water?  The chemical smell of that aisle is the stuff we’re putting against our bodies.  If you want scented soap, make sure you know how those scents are created – chemically or naturally.
  4. Check the internet. See where the company stands on environmental issues, what they put in their soap, and a slew of other things.  Most people probably don’t look at company websites.  I do for every brand we use against our skin; I want to understand what the company is doing.
  5. Check out the packaging. Now that going green is the hip, money maker for businesses, everyone’s into it.  But I laugh.  If they’re going green, why do their products come in excess packaging and in bottles that can’t be recycled?  (I haven’t found anywhere that accepts bright orange, purple, blue… plastics.)  A company can’t be green if their packaging choice is destined for landfills.
  6. Read the label for something else. Is the soap biodegradable or is it entering our water supply and creating damage?  Plant based ingredients are best, and the package should tell you if it’s biodegradable.  Obviously if it’s not biodegradable, it says nothing on the subject.

Our house gives a huge thumbs up to a product we can find in Germany and the US:  Ecover.  We went and bought some as soon as I realized what that chemically detergent was doing to us.  My skin is thanking me for switching.  And chances are, if you consider making the swap, your skin will be a little brighter, too.

(image from Ecover)