Natural soap and the environment have a fundamentally different relationship than synthetic personal care products. From ingredient sourcing to manufacturing to use to disposal, natural soap's environmental footprint is smaller at nearly every stage. For athletes who spend time outdoors and care about the environments they train in, this is relevant beyond marketing.
Ingredient Sourcing
Natural soap is made from plant-derived fats and oils — coconut oil, olive oil, shea butter, castor oil — and botanical extracts. These ingredients are renewable, biodegradable, and produced through agricultural and extraction processes that have existed for centuries.
Synthetic detergent surfactants — SLS, SLES, and related compounds — are derived from petroleum or from petrochemical processing of plant materials. Even when starting from a plant source (coconut-derived SLS), the industrial chemical processing required to produce the final compound creates a product with a different environmental profile than traditionally processed plant oils.
Packaging
A natural bar soap has essentially zero packaging — a paper wrap at most. A liquid body wash requires a plastic bottle that is used once and discarded. The average household goes through 4 to 8 plastic shampoo and body wash bottles per year. Switching to bar soap eliminates this plastic waste entirely.
The environmental impact of plastic production and plastic waste is well-documented. For a category like personal care where bar soap alternatives have been available for thousands of years, the plastic packaging question is particularly stark.
Manufacturing
Natural soap manufacturing — saponification of plant oils — is a simple chemical process with low energy requirements and minimal waste products. The main byproduct, glycerin, is either retained in the soap (beneficial) or sold for use in other products (nothing wasted).
Synthetic surfactant manufacturing requires multiple industrial chemical processing steps, significant energy input, and produces chemical waste streams that require treatment before disposal. The manufacturing footprint of synthetic personal care products is substantially larger than traditional soap making.
Biodegradability
The sodium salts of fatty acids that constitute natural soap are readily biodegradable. When soap enters water systems, microorganisms break it down efficiently. This is why natural soap is the appropriate choice for backcountry washing — even biodegradable soap should be used at least 200 feet from water sources, but it biodegrades much more quickly than synthetic surfactants.
Synthetic surfactants biodegrade more slowly and some accumulate in aquatic environments. SLES biodegrades readily under aerobic conditions but more slowly in the anaerobic conditions of some water systems. Synthetic fragrances include compounds that are persistent in aquatic environments and have documented effects on aquatic organisms.
For Outdoor Athletes Specifically
Runners, hikers, and outdoor athletes have the most direct stake in the health of the environments they train in. Choosing products with lower environmental footprint is consistent with the relationship outdoor athletes have with natural spaces. The soap that goes down your shower drain eventually enters water treatment systems and, partially, water bodies. What's in that soap matters for those systems.
Our natural soap lineup uses biodegradable ingredients, minimal packaging, and formulations without persistent synthetic compounds. The same principle that drives our ingredient choices — use what works, avoid what doesn't need to be there — applies to the environmental dimension of our products as much as the skin health dimension.
Beyond Clean, Beyond Ordinary.