Here’s is super simple way to do natural laundry washing using compostable soap nuts from fair trade sources. Soap nuts (soap berries) from the Sapindus mukorossi tree are 100% natural, non-toxic, hypoallergenic, and eco-friendly – safe for children, people with sensitive skin and pets too. Good for laundry and to wash dishes, hair, hands, floors, surfaces, pets…. These are simple, natural and effective. I just wish I could grow the tree here!

(NB: for some reason the last few words are cut off – apologies)

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Read the full transcript below:

Welcome back, it’s Morag from our Permaculture Life and the Permaculture Education Institute and it’s plastic free July. 

And every day and around four o’clock, I’m going live talking about something you can do to diminish the single-use plastics or just the abundance of plastic containers. That we end up bringing into our homes every day or every time we go to the shops. So I’m in my laundry today

and I wanted to talk about these. These are soap nuts, now soap nuts are actually the fruits of a tree that comes from a tropical area. And so I sauce these from fair trade organizations and the amazing thing about these is that you can use them not only in your laundry. But you can use them to wash dishes, you can use them to wash your hair, you can use them to wash your pets. You can use them around your house you know, doing floor or surface cleaning. So there’s so many different uses for these. Now there’s different ways that you can use them typically when you buy them. You get a little calico bag and you can grab maybe let’s see four or five. So one, two, three, four, five I’ll put 5 in. So you put five in and you just tie up this little bag, and then what you do is you toss that into your washing machine. Put all your clothes in and that is it! Thing about it too is that it worked; they last for about four or five washes. And so once they’ve finished, you just take them out of the bag, pop them into your compost and it’s completely compostable. You reuse the bag and get some more of those that’s one way of doing it. Another way of doing it is, making a liquid. So this is one way I often do; I just put the five in the bottom and I’ll just shake it up a bit, so you can actually see how. I see it’s quite soapy there, they are actually very soapy. Little things I’ve tried finding something in Australia, that’s equivalent but I can’t find anything quite as good as this. So what I’ll do is, it hasn’t been going for long enough but I will soak these overnight. 

So then tomorrow when I want to come and do some washing, I can just put it in the normal spot near where you put the washing liquid. And use that, pop it in and then that will be what it’s needed to wash the clothes. Then you just refill this and I always check to see whether there’s enough soap before I use it again. Otherwise I’ll put some more in. So generally it’s four or five times so that’s great! And this is the thing that you can also use to wash your hands, to wash your hair and wash dishes as well. So that’s soap nuts, you can typically buy them in sort of natural food stores or buy them online as well. So really make sure that you look for the fair trade ones, so that they’re coming from. A place where the people are growing and harvesting them is getting a fair price and they’re being treated fairly. 

So I’ll catch up again tomorrow back in my garden or somewhere in my home. Talking about ways that we can get rid of the single-use plastics in our life. And I’ll put some links down below too, about some of the permaculture ways of thinking and ways of gardening. Because all of this is part of a Permaculture way of life, of how to diminish our impact on the planet.