Stumble It!Soap nuts, reducing waste.
Soap grows on trees! Anyone who has been reading here for any length of time or known me on forums, or even in real life, will know this already. So to manufacture soap nuts you need some land, a tree or several and a person able to harcest the berries when they dry. That’d be no waste going to landfill from the production process then.
There, soap berries, small and leathery and jam packed full of saponin (Soap) ready to wash anything you need cleaning from kids to clothes, and your car, windows, floor……
They grow a large, long lived tree which contributes to the carbon cycle, oxygen and water cycles as well as holding the soil together and preventing erosion and not even starting on the range of habitats a tree provides, and that is all before the tree even begins to fruit at 9 years old or so.
Once the tree begins to fruit the harvest cleans pretty much anything and all without chemical residue. Have you spotted any waste yet? The soap nuts are growing and being used and there’s NO WASTE! Compare that with a commercial washing powder - even a natural/eco friendly one - there’s a factory, there’s some waste, even if it’s minimised.
So, we want soap nuts in the UK. Now we have some fuel consumed and there’s pollution and waste involved there but it’s offset by using land freight where possible and consider the huge waste reduction up until now.
Right, I have soap nuts in my house and I sell them on through Ethics Trading and we’re back to minimum waste again.
I use paper bags to send out your soap nuts and these can be torn into your compost or put in your paper recycling. When you’ve used the soap nuts they can go in the compost or green/garden waste to be recycled. If any padding is needed in your order I either reuse packaging I’ve been sent or I use my own paper recycling that I’ve shredded.
The only waste I generate is the plastic mailing bag I send your order in
and I am currently hunting for a cheap alternative that will be watertight for the postal system here.
There’s as little rubbish generated as I can possibly manage at the moment and I’m always looking for ways to do even better.
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July 31st, 2008 at 5:17 pm
That’s really neat! I had no idea.
I have a question for you about how you added the ads on the side of your blog…I have a wordpress blog too, and can’t figure out how to do it! Would you mind sharing how(perhaps via email, so I don’t further derail this thread??) lol
July 31st, 2008 at 5:36 pm
Hi Kristen,
This blog is self hosted and I know that makes it different from a wordpress hosted blog. Wordpress (I think, from the last time I looked at free blog hosting) don’t like you to run ads on their servers and that’s why I’ve never gone with wp before. If you host the database yourself it’s a slightly different system with different functionality.
I can talk you through it, and even refer you for ethical ads but check you can run them first?
July 31st, 2008 at 7:13 pm
Ahhh, I see. Maybe I should wait until I have a good deal of traffic and then spring for self-hosting? How much traffic do I need to make it worth that? How do you even go about self-hosting? I have no idea about this stuff. I used to have a blog on blogger, and there I could just put adsense as a widget, but that doesn’t work on Wordpress.
July 31st, 2008 at 7:14 pm
And for an on-topic comment…I make my own laundry detergent, using bar soap, borax, and washing soda, all of which come in cardboard containers. The only plastic is the wrap about the multipack of soap. Not as low-impact as soap nuts, but better than buying detergent at least!
July 31st, 2008 at 7:58 pm
Well, as this is part of Ethics Trading it’s just on the same servers and under the same host - I use Eco Web Hosts and you can find a link to their site on the front or links page of the main site. They’re reasonable priced and WP is included, as well as having the eco cred I wanted.
Here I just pop the code for ads in as a widget, the Ethical Ads at the top are a bit more tricky but I could still do it. I can do that on blogger and blogsome, but not on WP.
Making your own laundry stuff sounds ace, is that the stuff known as gloop?
July 31st, 2008 at 9:21 pm
I don’t know if it’s called that! lol I modified the recipe from The Simple Dollar, and I plan to do a post on it in the next week or so(I’m going to do a cheap laundry week on The Frugal Girl).
July 31st, 2008 at 9:23 pm
Gah…I can’t edit, but I wanted to say that you were right and that I can’t host ads on wordpress as it is. I have to have my own hosting. But, there is this server called DreamHost, I think, that is only like $6.95 a month, and I think I might give that a try. I’ll check out the one you mentioned as well.
I don’t know what my average traffic is, but my highest day has had 151 views, and my lower days tend to be around 56-60. But, I’ve only been up for less than a month, and I think my traffic will increase(at least I hope so! lol).