Detoxing Cleaning Products and Homemade Dish Soap

January's project of detoxing my household products is underway! The first thing I did is take everything from under the kitchen sink and sort through it. Apologies in advance for the picture quality; my camera is AWOL at the moment so I'm using my phone.

I've been pretty serious about keeping cleaning products nontoxic for a few years now. Most of this stuff was here when I moved in, and I just hadn't gotten around to getting rid of it. I used the Household Products Database which is run by the National Institutes of Health to sort through everything. I got rid of everything that was scary and/or I don't use, and here's what's left.

It's a lot less, and I'm glad to have some of that junk out of my house.

Although the things I actually use are fairly nontoxic, you can see that most of it is still commercially made products. I like them, but they're expensive and come with too much packaging. As stuff runs out, I'm going to try making my own cleaners. Conveniently today I ran out of dish soap, so it's time to cook up a batch.

I used this recipe from Hillbilly Housewife (the second one). I went to Target first, where I found an olive oil dispenser bottle for about $3.

I looked for a bar of simple, cheap glycerin soap but everything that wasn't full of fragrances was stupidly expensive. So I went onto Whole Foods and picked up a bar of their unscented store-brand glycerin soap for $1.99.

The next step is to grate or slice the soap. After contemplating the godawful pain it would be to clean soap flakes out of my cheese grater (and the sad prospect of soapy-tasting cheese) I decided to slice thin slices of it with a knife instead.

I sliced 1/4 cup of soap flakes, as thin as I could. I added them to 2 cups of water in a pan and heated it on medium heat, stirring until the flakes dissolved. It took longer than I expected -- almost 10 minutes -- probably because my slices weren't as efficient as grating it, but it eventually dissolved. I let the mixture cool for awhile, then added 1 teaspoon of bottled lemon juice (the acidity from which supposedly helps cut grease). After cooling it completely I poured the mixture into my bottle. 

Et voila, the finished product! One batch of soap (minus the bit I spilled) completely fills the bottle. It seems to work pretty well so far, though I haven't used it on any seriously dirty dishes yet. The recipe says you can add some essential oil for smell, but it has a fairly neutral, vaguely lemony scent that I really like. It is more watery than commercial dish soap, so that may take some getting used to. This recipe used 1/4 of a bar of soap; the rest of the ingredients were of negligible cost, so one bottle of homemade dish soap was $0.50.

If this were etsy and I were some sort of creative dork, I'd put a cutesy label on it and decorate the bottle. But this isn't, and I'm not, so there it is -- dish soap. It looks like laundry detergent may be the next thing to run out, so I'll probably be making that next. Until then, adios.

UPDATE: After sitting overnight, the soap thickened considerably. I had to give it a good stir in the bottle to break it up a bit, and now it works great. I also used it on a sink of dirty pots and pans, and it cut the grease like a champ. Looks like this will be my go-to soap recipe from now on.

UPDATE #2 (1/19/2013): I just made my second batch. This time I used my microplane grater to shred the soap. It dissolved really quickly and it was actually very easy to clean the grater afterwards. I also added more lemon juice this time, maybe a full tablespoon, and this made the consistency similar to commercial dish soap and thus much easier to work with.