Environmental Performance : Bar vs. Liquid Soap

HANDSOAP - COMPARISON OF THE LIFE CYCLES OF VARIOUS RECIPES AND PROCESSING METHODS
by Kimi Ceridon


Introduction
Commonly, choices for improving a consumer’s environmental sustainability tend to focus on big ticket items such as vehicle purchases or major lifestyle changes such as selecting local, organic food supplies. The cost and effort associated with these changes may be discouraging or simply not feasible to implement due to time or budget constraints. However, many everyday choices offer opportunities to make small improvements in personal sustainability while involving no additional effort or cost to implement. The barrier to making such choices is typically a lack of consumer information and communication allowing them to compare the environmental impacts of the everyday products they consume. These are products consumers readily and conveniently access and interact with everyday without much thought to their origins including items like personal hygiene products, home cleaning products and everyday disposables and durables. One such everyday product consumers interact with multiple times a day is soap used for handwashing. The following study takes a closer look at the environmental performance two types of hand soap alternatives – bar soap and liquid soap.

There is large variation in hand soap products available on the market. Differences in the ecological impact associated with these products can be attributed to everything from variations in the basic formulation to differences in packaging methods to size of manufacturing scale to dispenser methods to how a customer uses the product. This initial survey focuses on studying and comparing the ecological impacts of a few versions of these products. The goal is to examine broad product categories to evaluate the degree of disparity between the environmental impacts of the products, evaluate hotspots that offer opportunities for decreasing the disparity and, through a brief sensitivity assessment, guide future studies in focusing on important environmental issues associated with hand soap formulation, packaging, use and disposal.

The study subsets are as follows:

The study summarized here uses one methodology to evaluate multiple scenarios. The goal is to determine the best path to pursue for future studies and provide preliminary guidance for formulating or purchasing future products.