A few years back, I began to save shards and slivers of broken soap bars out of, I don’t know, GUILT, I suppose. Guilt about how I was sending all kinds of expensive, nicely cologned, eye-opening-delightful COAST Soap into a landfill only to leach its detergents and lye into neighboring garbage and eventually into the soil below.
I didn’t want to be responsible for making some poor kid’s drinking water too soapy to stand.
Then I started thinking about how many thousands of shards and slivers of Coast Soap (and, before I got hooked on that brand, Irish Spring — still my backup) that I have carelessly disposed of over the years. And about how many of my friends also use that brand, or some other, that makes them smell great. Then about how many other millions of folks across the land are cursing their broken bars and just pitching the pieces into the trash can, never giving it a second thought.
I resolved that this would be my first blog post for YourOwnEditor.com, and so here it is.
One of my aims with this blog is going to be to bring attention and awareness and, perhaps, civic activism to topics of environmental awareness such as this, in the hope of trying to make this a better world for future generations (or, at least, to give them more of a chance against the weight of human history’s environmental destruction).
I’d like to know what we consumers can do about this, to slash the stream of soap shards that are making their way into our landfills. This will be the subject of future posts as well, but I’m putting this up now because I want to get started.
The accompanying gallery of photos illustrates the stream of wanton wastage that I intend to stop, from my house and many others. The photos are a representation of how much soap might be expected to be thrown away over a period of a week, a month, a quarter and … you get the idea. I have an almost-full quart Ziplock bag full of mostly Coast shards that I would love to melt down and make into new bars if anyone knows of a quick/easy/simple way to do that …
I am by no means done on the subject of Coast or soap wastage … just getting started, in fact.
Incredible quest there. What happened after? Good luck!
I like it, can’t wait to see where it lead you!
I remember reading something a long time ago about someone who collected used soap for recycling and donated it to poor countries, very welcome indeed.