Saturday, March 26, 2011

Sustainable soaps: creativity and future!


In the last years, there was an increase interest in sustainability and in all related sciences (economy, chemistry, engineering, etc.). We need to change our eyes to see what is around us, we need a change of our "paradigma", if we want to keep on living in our planet. First of all, I would love to point on the concept of sustainability. Sustainability overcomes economy, environmental science and biology, we could define it as the system of rules and structures to assure our needs without compromising the needs of the future generations. Considering that we have to care about the lack of resources of the planet, we have to think about using different products or materials in our processes that can be regenerated by nature in a reasonable time. In this post, I write about soaps, I mean the natural ones, made by using only vegetable oils and that can contain also food wastes or any other type of organic ingredients that gives to the soap a specific function. A month ago, more or less, I started the production of olive oil soaps, avoiding to use other oils, since I live in Sicily, the island of olives and it doesnt make any sense to buy coconut or palm oil that come from far away regions. Furthermore, instead of use essential oils to put the parfum to the soap, I used the peel of oranges, mandarines and lemons, something that all of us throw away from the plates after eating these fruits: a waste! But they are perfectly good to give to soaps, an original parfum as well as incredible estethic effects! Creativity and care of our resources means future and sustainability.

2 comments:

  1. I live in the south of Italy too, and with a friend we are trying to make our own soap with olive oil and oranges but we don't want to use the cautic soda. Do you have any suggestion? Do you use the caustic soda? Thanks. Daniela

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  2. Ciao Daniela,
    Caustic soda is a fundamental ingredient for the saponification. You can use alternative bases like sodium carbonate or also sodium bicarbonate but in this case the process has a different path and you need to act in the temperature of the reaction and may be warm up the system as well as to use catalysts. Good luck! Alessandro

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