I’m surprised the youth of Lemmy hasn’t picked up more on the “liquid soap is bad for the environment” thing. I got berated at length by my Millennial SIL (me, GenX) for using liquid soap, and because this was family, I actually did a deep dive into the subject so I could win the argument and put her in her fucking place, and it turns out she was right.
Why did I have to learn this in meatspace, and not on the internet from random kids? Things ain’t right, I tell you, when my extended family knows and/or cares more about an environmental topic than left-leaning Lemmy.
Thanks for telling us why it’s bad for the environment
they add preservatives because there is water
the shipping costs are higher
it’s just all-around modern wasteful
Uses plastic bottles when bar soap does not.
It’d probably be better if people refilled, but the plastic goes into the waste stream, so that’s definitely not good. (I’m skeptical of how much gets recycled, even if you do the right thing and put it in the recycling bin)
In my dreams of bettering consumerism, I often think a lot about refills. We waste so so so so so much money on packaging and it’s all waste. You could get one plastic cereal box and refill it 100x at Walmart with a dispenser. What blows my mind is that you can do all of this with exchange programs. We already do this with the big plastic water jugs. We used to do it with glass milk bottles. It’s insanity to keep buying shampoo that comes in the same bottle but get extra trash with it every time.
Btw plastic bottles are also bad for you. BPA was the worst endocrine suppressor of them all but, make no mistake, all plastics are endocrine suppressors. BPA just wound up being the scapegoat. Microplastics in our blood aside, whatever you put into plastic will end up being a vehicle for toxins. While eating/drinking from plastic is really bad, one doesn’t usually appreciate the surface area of our skin.
Plastic is only safe for surfaces that we rarely interact with.
But does it make any sort of actual difference?
Less efficient in terms of transportation - you’re shipping a whole bunch of water that doesn’t add to the cleaning, which takes up more space, so less soap is being carried, etc.
Plastic packaging vs paper packaging for some solid soaps.
Some shower gels have microplastics for added abrasion, but so do some soaps tbf. Still, less good at cleaning because solid soaps involve more scrubbing.
Often can’t get everything out of the bottle. Some bottles don’t allow you to take the cap off and fill them with water to fully empty them.
Some shower gels have microplastics for added abrasion, but so do some soaps tbf. Still, less good at cleaning because solid soaps involve more scrubbing.
Congress passed a law banning these in 2015. That’s not to say micro plastics aren’t still present in some, or that they didn’t find loopholes, but the plastic beads in body wash issue was actually being addressed.
I don’t live in america but good to know 👍
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Which do you think takes more energy to ship: One pouch of Kool Aid powder or a gallon of pre-made Kool Aid?
Why did I have to learn this in meatspace, and not on the internet from random kids? Things ain’t right, I tell you, when my extended family knows and/or cares more about an environmental topic than left-leaning Lemmy.
Because everything is on fire and while using less soap and laundry detergent bottles is certainly a good goal to aim for, it is rearranging deck chairs on the titanic and worse it is rearranging deck chairs according to the directions of a captain who is trying to distract everyone from dealing with the fact that the ship is sinking.
Recycling by and large doesn’t work but corporations really don’t care because recycling is a great way to sell consumers the experience of being environmental when consuming and it provides way to shift blame and get people focused on recycling rather than the actions of big corporations.
As recycling implodes as a cultural ritual of “doing your part” to save the environment there has been a rise in advertisements from companies selling smaller detergent and soap bottles and I think they are trying to fulfill the same emotional need and story .
Which isn’t to say these soap bottles aren’t a good thing, but if the left leaning people you interact with aren’t focused on this… I don’t think that is indicative of anything but the high number of existential environmental problems we face and the general refusal of neoliberal and rightwing governments to tackle them.
Basically this.
Going green is good, but the reality is it’s out of the control of the average individual. Corporations sold us the blame, made us feel like we could do something so they could pass it off as our responsibility.
Even if every single low to middle income family took charge and did everything they could at their own inconvenience, the progress would still be far less in comparison to what the wealthy could achieve. Sadly, we barely ever think about this and even modern climate activists like that young Swedish girl have come to perpetuate the lie that the wealthy have sold us.
It all comes down to the same basic premise: we aren’t going to consume our way out of the climate catastrophe. I don’t blame people for thinking this, though. If you’ve lived your whole life under an economy and social order who’s keystone and ultimate guiding force is consumption, it’s easy to see consumption as your only recourse. Something something, if all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like nails. Our only option is to completely dismantle the systems that catalyzed the climate crisis: embracing anti-capitalism, crushing special interests, and ultimately empowering working class people.
we aren’t going to consume our way out of the climate catastrophe. I don’t blame people for thinking this, though. If you’ve lived your whole life under an economy and social order who’s keystone and ultimate guiding force is consumption, it’s easy to see consumption as your only recourse.
I don’t blame people either, I was raised in the same frame of reference that we have to consume our way out of this crisis and that the environmental crisis is fundamentally a story of our collective moral failings to be personally responsible.
People want to fix things, and I will be the last person to say that helping out a little bit doesn’t go a long way. It’s just, we need to evolve our understanding past framing the climate crisis as a story of our average people not having any personal responsibility to a frame of reference where we understand the class politics, the power of corporations to undermine environmentalism and the general collective solidarity between workers globally that will actually have the power to halt the climate crisis.
How does empowering working class people solve the consumption issue though?
Not all recycling is useless. Aluminium and glass are two things that benefit greatly from recycling. Recycling aluminum takes 95% less energy than smelting it from ore, simply because it’s such a complex process. And recycling glass is just a matter of re-melting it.
Not debating that certain types of recycling work, but if we don’t disconnect the word “recycling” from “wholesome and good!” we are going to keep hallucinating that we are in a far different problem than we are. so I am hesitant to start immediately listing all the types of recycling that do work when having a conversation about how recycling doesn’t work because that just reframes the conversation under terms of a status quo “recycling just needs to be reformed to work for more things!” fashion in the same way that “clean coal” is a purposeful dead end taken to postpone an upheaval of the status quo.
I didn’t mention recycling, but then, I didn’t mention much about the topic.
It’s not recycling that’s the issue. It’s the fact that millions of people are paying to move mostly water around, which has - in aggregate - a huge impact in terms of fuel consumption. Each bottle of hand soap is not expensive to transport, and cleans far less, than a single bar of solid soap. And this isn’t the only environmental impact; recycling or no, bar soap requires far less packaging, and that packaging is often renewable resources that are bio-degradable, whereas liquid soap nearly uniformly requires quite a lot of plastic packaging.
These weren’t the only points in ecological favor of bar soap; I didn’t memorize the list, but the arguments were substantial, unequivocal, and not debatable. And easily discoverable online.
We’ve switched to solid shampoo — only drawback is it can be harder to tell which is shampoo and which is conditioner, because there’s no single-use plastic telling me which is which.
Which brand do you use?
Ethique (no complaints but haven’t shopped around).
Water + soap + coconut + peppermint oil
Sure let me just pull out this random bottle of coconut and peppermint oil I have laying around…wait, these bottles are made of plastic too…why am I doing this again?
…seriously though I see plenty of premade bars online and was more looking for a recommendation. I’m not going to fucking homebrew shampoo and conditioner bars.
I get my bars online through Amazon (Walmart does not carry a 12 pack)
And I get my liquid one (for bathroom and kitchen sink dispenser) from Walmart.
It took my skin a week or two to get used to the soap without all the BS, but now I can never go back to anything else. I use the bar soap to shave with for gods sake! It’s THAT good!
I’ve tried Sterling’s shampoo bars and I like them. You’ll want to use conditioner with those. A friend of mine recommended Lush bars but I haven’t had a chance to try them.
I’ve tried a few different Lush dry shampoos and conditioners, and all of them were way too oily for my hair.
You have to make your own coconut and pepperment oils using ingredients locally sourced from sustainable operations. And store them in glass bottles.
IDK what to tell you. Near me I have multiple stores where I can fill my own bottle with these oils and they’re very low cost
Also use ethique, no complaints.
I’ve been on solid shampoo and soap for a while now, I just try random ones when the old ones are finished. It’s great I love it, takes less space in the shower, smells/feels/washes great, at this point I would not enjoy going back to bottles.
I humbly ask for deletion of this information, so it stays off Lemmy! Bar soap is more “dense”, as you don’t need that much water for it which reduces required water in production, weight in shipping and less packaging. Bar soap is generally a bit more aggressive towards the skin however with higher pH.
"Random Lemmy post starts movement crippling liquid soap market! News at 11.”
I humbly ask for deletion of this information, so it stays off Lemmy!
What information?
I humbly ask for deletion of this information, so it stays off Lemmy!
Lol imagine if this is how lemmy actually worked.
My question is, why are concentrated soaps not bigger for human use like they are for animals? The shampoo and conditioner to wash my dog comes in a gallon jug and dilutes 50:1. That gallon jug lasts me years, and I’m bathing a golden retriever that has a lot of hair. If shampoo came by default in a gallon jug we just had to mix once or twice a month with water in a separate bottle we would save so much plastic, so much cost, and so much transportation weight!
And concentrated products for pets are more common than diluted ones. So clearly we know how to do this, why don’t we do it for human stuff too by default?
For animals things are done practically. For humans things are done profitably.
I think the pet industry rivals human products for profit; not so much for livestock, but for pets it’s still profit-driven.
I feel like most people just don’t need to look into it much. Like, it’s kind of obvious enough (if one is aware of it), that no plastic bottle is better than a plastic bottle, and it’s not like bar soap is a massive downgrade.
Personally, I tried them for climate min-maxing reasons, but then found out that I actually prefer them by a lot.But then as the others said, it’s not like it will win the climate war. So, if someone does have a reason or even just a preference for liquid soap, there’s no point in berating them specifically for that. Like, wash yourself with liquid soap all you want, and rather give some vegan food options an honest try or take the bus more often or something along those lines.
Is that not shampoo?
They make bar shampoo, too.
At 25 I lived in a 3 bedroom, 1 bathroom house with 13 people in a beach town and chuckled to myself about how people waste so much money on having a house all to their own when they could be having so much fun, surrounded by friends every day. Sorry 25 year old me… I enjoy quiet, peeing indoors and not fighting over power usage and who left their dishes laying around.
If you are into peeing a lot of free content
I stopped using soap at 13 and I’m a trillionaire.
Trickle some of that down please
Sounds like the only thing he’s trickling down is mucus
My friend, Target has a knockoff Dove body wash for $2. Tell them to go fuck themselves.
$5.49, but who’s counting?
Only $4.49 for me
WTF are you guys doing over there? 0.55€ in Germany: https://www.dm.de/balea-cremedusche-mandelbluete-und-magnolie-p4066447234657.html
American-style capitalism
I own a house, car, etc and I still make sure that I get every last drop of shampoo out of the bottle. Not saying that is how you save enough for down payment but just that they aren’t mutually exclusive.
The only thing that it indicates is that you’re not wasteful.
But i’m thinking if you cry about it, the meaning is pretty clear.
I’m even designing a 3D printed jig so I can securely connect any two bottles and let gravity do the work overnight.
Same. I still believe “if you take care of the pennies the dollars take care of themselves” of course, that implies the ownership of dollars, which some do not have, so this wisdom does not always translate completely.
“Own” is a very tricky word, when paired with “Down Payment”
What exactly is that poorly drawn mouse-like creature actually doing, and why?
Watering down the remaining 7-in-1 shower product because they can’t afford to replenish supplies because the price of everything is too damn high.
Of soap tho? Here in Germany you can buy the store brand, which is decent, for like 50 cents a bottle - which lasts you weeks.
The brand stuff (fa, nivea, axe, old spice) is 1 to 3 euros and the luxury (rituals, loccitaine, etc) 5 to 15.
That’s $6 a bottle. Cheapest comparable is probably $4
I showed this to my wife and she said “Who the fuck had Dove money at 25?”
Dove body wash is the cheapest per ounce at Costco. Yep, even cheaper than Kirkland.
That’s cheap. In Norway it’ll cost you at least equivalent 3$/€ for an off brand large bottle and 2$/€ for an off brand small one
Well, it is kind of an extreme example to illustrate that OP feels like they have to save money wherever they can. Well, it might also be somewhat of a hyperbole for comedic effect, I don’t know that.
Running a small amount of water into a nearly empty bottle of shampoo (or body wash, etc.) allows you to get the last little bit out of the bottle. It’s basically an austerity measure, a sign that a person is stretching every dollar.
That’s Jerry from Tom and Jerry
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Oh yes the American way of throwing away that last 2-3% of soap to feel rich
I just can’t figure out why top opening or pump based soaps can’t just have a bottom opening spout instead. simple design issue resolves waste, good for everyone involved.
Flip the bottle upside down in the shower caddy.
I do, but even then if you’ve got a pump bodywash you have to deal with unscrewing the shit and waiting. it’s a shit design.
If this doesn’t work. Close the lid, and throw it at the ground but don’t let go.
All the liquid will “throw” itself at the cap inside the bottle. Works for everything thinner than toothpaste.
Get a decent refillable pump and buy soap refills instead of dispensers. Problem solved
Because that would mean less money for the brand
I once read (ages ago, can’t find the source now) that it is deliberate - because with mass produced consumer goods such as shower gel or body lotion etc. if you throw away the last 2-3 uses because they are too hard to get out of the bottle, you will buy earlier and hence more of their product. They give you effectively less than you pay for, and it adds up for them. And they get away with it because it’s your choice to rather buy a new bottle for convenience. So of course, it’s again because corporations are only interested in cutting corners to give you the minimum viable product possible.
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Aesthetics I guess
lol no, those decisions are 100% profit driven.
Yep
Tbf, it’s entirely possible you’re both right and the reason is “this bottle sells better because it looks nice”
right, but “looks nice” only becomes a consideration when you’re trying to sell a brand, rather then provide a good product. If they were trying to sell a good product, they would definitely put a pump at the bottom so that you can get all of the product out with ease to use the example from th thread, but they don’t not because of how it looks (even if it was a barrier, they would just engineer it to look more “appealing” like they do everything else), but because they want it to be hard to get all of the product out, so that you buy a new one without having used it all. Because profit.
Ding, ding and another ding. I am shocked that people give corps still the benefit of doubt, and assume it’s because of “nicer looks”.
The point I was trying to make was “because profit”. I was just trying to say it was plausible that some asshat in marketing said that design would sell better for appearance reasons as well. That’s not benefit of the doubt, that’s just a different way of being profit over product.
Edit - top opening bottles tend to be taller and thinner than bottom opening for balance reasons. A certain subset of consumers are gonna assume taller bottle means more product and buy it. So there you go-a possible profit driven aesthetic reason. There was literally a post here the other day with Coke cans doing essentially the same fucking thing.
Why would you become a cartoon mouse at 25?
puberty
first or second
At least I have chicken.
God dammit leroy
It’s not my fault!
See, this is what’s wrong with America. This is the future liberals want. The demonrats are putting estrogen in the vaccines to turn everyone into cartoon mice.
My favorite was that time I was making enough to afford the payments on a mortgage but they wouldn’t give me a mortgage because my credit score wasn’t good enough and they were worried I couldn’t make the payments even though I provided the income information that showed I could totally make the payments because fuck me for being young I guess.
So instead I spent years paying way more to rent, preventing me from saving up enough to buy much of anything.
