As spring arrives with its blossoming gardens and blooming orchards, it’s prime time for people to rekindle their care for nature through new, innovative activities. Over the past few weeks, a couple of tree-hugging Richard Montgomery rockets gathered to puzzle together and test-out a recipe for green herbal soap–an anti-bacterial, eco-friendly, hand-cleaning agent that generates 0% pollution.
Not only is this fun-sized, fragrant specimen a plus for keeping our waters clean, its making offers the perfect pastime for friends to convene and deepen their bonds.
The idea of “cooking” soap has been around for a couple centuries, probably most concretely portrayed in one scene from Gone With the Wind when Scarlett O’Hara stirred a pot of seaming oil under a burnt barn. Indeed, that is the base ingredient for an eco-friendly soap: cooking oil!
By mixing oil (vegetable, corn, olive, etc), lye, and water together under the right temperature and proportions, anyone can churn out a bar of usable soap. More interestingly, if one adds certain herbal and fruit extracts, the soap can even become anti-bacterial and pleasing to the nose.
Before starting the soap-making process, you need to take safety precautions. Lye is a caustic soda. The use of lye should not be taken lightly and parental supervision is recommended for using lye in the soap-making process.
Here is a step-by-step guide on how to make this charming soap:
There we have it! A 100% natural-ingredient, handy cleaning tool and a creative present for friends. View another simple soap-making recipe.
Benefits of using home-made soap:
So why wait? All ingredients are available at Home Depot and a little time on a Sunday afternoon can yield a month-need of soap for an entire household.
At Richard Montgomery High School, a couple green-agents have already made a batch of our green herbal-soap and we’re currently exploring possibilities of replacing the commercial foam-soaps in student bathrooms with our invention. This is a small, yet sound step to conserve our environment.
Environmentalism and entertainment are intertwined. There are streams of freshwater to be saved and barrels of fun to be harvested through crafting a soap-bar.
Guest Article by Jessica Li, student, Richard Montgomery High School