Category: Green

Homemade Laundry Soap – Save green by going green.

This simple recipe will help you eliminate toxic chemicals from your wash cycle and waste water. It will also save loads of money. For a cost of less than a penny a load you can make your own effective, liquid, concentrated, HE, laundry soap that won’t harm your septic system or the fish downstream.

Ingredients
1 bar bath soap, grated (Ivory or Fels Naptha work well, but you can use your favorite)
1 cup Arm and Hammer Washing Soda (not to be confused with baking soda)
1/2 cup borax (20 Mule Team or not)
Hot Water (tap water hot, not boiling)

Directions

  1. Place grated Soap in a saucepan or pot.
  2. Add about 6 cups water and simmer over medium heat until all the soap is completely melted, stirring occasionally.
  3. Pour into five gallon bucket.
  4. Add Washing Soda and Borax.
  5. Add enough Hot Water to fill the bucket to quarter full.
  6. Stir. Use a long enough implement to thoroughly mix everything up from the bottom.
  7. Let it sit overnight to gel. (Keep it in a place that is safely away from children or pets.)
  8. Stir again to assure consistency of the gel and break up any lumps.
  9. Use 1/4 cup for top loaders or 2 Tablespoons for front loaders, just like the commercial stuff.

You can pour this into an old detergent container or any safe, sealable container. You could put the quarter you save with each load into your solar water heater fund.

Make Room for 4,000,000,000 More People

Demographers predict that by the year 2050 there will be more than 10 billion people on earth. It is time that we start making room for them. A good place to begin would to make sure all the people who are here now are fed, housed, employed, respected and cared for.

This is what I intend this blog to discuss. It will be heavy on green issues, as these impact everyone at every stage of life and future generations. Economic inequities affect people in a given time. Using up resources that occur once in the lifecycle of the planet for the ease of a portion of three or four generations, while leaving toxic waste and a damaged global ecosystem to all future generations is an abomination.

I will not just rail against the current situation and powers that be. I will report on hopeful breakthroughs and suggest positive, doable actions. There will be people’s stories. Most people can’t really get their minds around caring for unseen, teeming masses, while they are just trying to see to their own families. I hope that we will start to recognize that we are all family.

The ‘featured image’ at the top of the article is entitled “Hope #15 Racial Equality” and is available for sale on www.shoutforjoy.net.