Reduce plastic usage with single use dish soap bars

Honestly for a lot of years I didn’t give buying a bottle of dish soap a second thought. But lately we’ve been taking a close look at ways we can reduce plastic usage. While we won’t ever be “plastic-free”, we can be more mindful of our purchases and this is a simple step to take

And some added bonuses – you’ll save money too. These bars are inexpensive to make so you’ll save money in the budget. Plus you have complete control over the ingredients, so no harsh ingredients!

The first batch I made was the first cold process soap I had made in almost 20 years! When I made soap before, I struggled with consistent results because I wasn’t using a digital scale or an immersion blender. With those tools on hand, it is SO much easier. You still need to be mindful of the lye. Safety gear like gloves is important.

Check out Brambleberry.com for soap making supplies, it, along with Amazon, is one of our main sources for supplies. Sometimes you can find what you need at local grocery or big box stores as well. We’ll be doing some posts and videos on soap making for beginners, so if you’re a newbie, stay tuned for more help.

Dish Soap Bar Recipe 2.0

While I loved the simplicity of the first dish soap bars I made, I wanted a little more cleaning power so I did some research, looked at about 1,436 recipes, and came up with this one. If you are attempting to change a recipe or create a new one, make sure you use a lye calculator to make sure your numbers are correct. You don’t want to go through the time and effort of soap making to end up with something to caustic to use.

With this dish soap bar recipe, I added citric acid, lime juice, lemon peel powder and increased the citrus essential oils. I increased the castor oil amount slightly to make it a little more sudsy. Now I don’t want to finish using up the bars from the original batch (but I will. Or maybe I’ll rebatch them. We’ll see)

Get a scrub brush and a soap dish, and you’ll be able to say good bye to one source of single use plastic in your home. This recipe makes about 12 3 – 3.5 ounce bars. Based on my unscientific research, 2-3 = one bottle of dish soap. 

If you’re looking to clean up your cleaning, check out this download. And if you love hand crafted soaps, but don’t necessarily want to make them, make sure to check out our soap shop!

Get an announcement every time the soap shop opens (yes we will have dish bars sometimes too!) plus great recipes, book recs and a lot more when you join the cool kids @ holistic-ish: