How to Make All Natural Laundry Soap

Last Updated: May 6, 2021

Making your own all-natural, powdered laundry soap may seem unnecessary when there are plenty of ready-made soaps in grocery stores. However, homemade laundry soap has distinct earth-friendly advantages over store-bought brands. Homemade soap reduces packaging waste, prevents harmful phosphates from infiltrating local water supplies, and leaves out the petroleum-based ingredients typically found in manufactured laundry soaps. Homemade laundry soap also saves you money, since a basic recipe uses just 3 ingredients that cost pennies per load. See Step 1 for more information.

Steps

1
Locate a large bucket to hold your ingredients and place it in well-ventilated room or outside. The cleaning ingredients in your homemade laundry soap are non-toxic but the dust in the powders can irritate sinuses.
2
Measure 2 cups (227 g) of washing soda into the bucket. Washing soda is a high-alkaline, powdered cleaning agent made from sodium carbonate that works similarly to baking soda by allowing you to cut grease, absorb oil spills and perform heavy cleaning jobs.

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3
Measure 2 cups (227 g) of borax laundry booster into the same bucket. Borax is a cleaning powder that kills bacteria, stabilizes the alkalinity of the washing soda and cleans clothes by releasing hydrogen peroxide as it mixes with water.
4
Grate one bar of soap into the powdered mixture. The bar of laundry soap you choose can be as simple as a generic bar of body soap manufactured for human use or it can also be a bar of laundry soap made specifically to spot-clean clean clothes.
- Allow several minutes to grate the soap by hand. If you're in a big hurry you can save time by cutting the soap into chunks and tossing it into your food processor.
5
Blend the ingredients together using a large spoon, paint stir stick or your gloved hand. Pour into a recycled laundry soap container.
6
Test your new soap by washing a load of clothes. Add 1/3 cup (79 ml) of the mixture into a full load of wash. To ensure the mix is well-agitated into the cleaning water, wait until your washing machine is about halfway full of water before adding your clothes to the soapy load.

Warnings

Do not add more soap if you don't see bubbles in the cleaning water. Handmade laundry soap will not foam like store bought soap but it cleans clothes just as thoroughly. Your Eco-friendly laundry soap won't lather because it doesn't contain phosphates, which causes bubbles but also leaves harmful, oxygen-depleting deposits in water supplies.

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