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  Straits Times Forum 25 Apr 07
Convenience of liquid soap comes at a high environmental cost
Letter from Malcolm Lower

THE recent campaign by supermarkets discouraging the use of free plastic bags and promoting reusable bags instead is good news for our environment.

If people really care about plastic waste, then there is another major source that should be addressed.

Over the past two years, liquid soaps and bath gels have almost completely replaced traditional bar soaps on supermarket shelves. This insidious invasion is immensely damaging to our environment.

Liquid soaps and bath gels are very profitable for the people who make and sell these products and very costly for the rest of us. We now pay about twice as much for our 'personal cleansers' and consume them about twice as fast as we did when we used bar soap.

Liquid soap does not make us any cleaner but it makes our environment a lot dirtier.

It might be argued that liquid soap is more convenient than bar soap. If this is true then this convenience comes at a high cost.

Modern bar soap is based on a relatively simple, tried and tested combination of readily available, naturally occurring, vegetable oils and alkalis. By contrast, many liquid soaps and bath gels are not soap at all; rather, they are modified detergents, made up of a complex cocktail of man-made chemicals.

This cocktail is, in itself, more harmful to the environment than traditional soap.

However, the real 'dirt' is in the packaging. Traditional bar soap is delivered in compact and easily disposed of paper wrapping. Liquid soap is delivered in bulky, costly and difficult-to-dispose-of plastic containers.

Singapore has about 900,000 households. If only half of these households buy just one liquid soap or bath gel each month, this means that we have at least 5.4 million extra plastic containers to dispose of every year.

Most plastic containers do not degrade or decompose, and they are extremely difficult and energy intensive to recycle. If they go into a landfill, they remain for a very long time and eventually leak their toxic compounds into the soil and groundwater. If they are incinerated, they emit toxic fumes directly into the atmosphere, damaging our health and exacerbating global warming.

Think about it: 5.4 million plastic containers for a product we simply do not need.

If you care about Singapore's environment and its future, please buy clean soap and think about what you put into your reusable bag.
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