How to make your own safe, nontoxic laundry powder that is roughly half the cost of buying good quality, green commercial brands.

If you do a lot of laundry in your home, it might make sense to investigate making your own laundry powder and homemade fabric softener.

The cost to make one batch, which washes 40 loads, is about $3. This translates to 8 cents per load.

By contrast, a good quality, (truly) nontoxic laundry powder (such as this brand) costs 16-21 cents per load depending on the retailer and the size you buy.

Thus, buying your own green laundry powder can save roughly half the cost of buying it!

Beware that many brands of so-called “safe” laundry powder are questionable at best when you actually look at the ingredients 🤯

Read labels carefully and take care not to be fooled by buzzwords!

When it comes to making your own green, unscented, hypoallergenic laundry powder, only a few simple ingredients are required.

Some may question my suggestion to briefly microwave the soap bar listed in the ingredients to soften it up before grinding into soap flakes in a food processor.

While it is best to never use a microwave for cooking food or heating water, it does occasionally come in handy for projects such as making your own laundry soap.

If you prefer to hand-grind the unscented Castile soap bar, that definitely works as an alternative.

However, it takes a lot of elbow grease and the results are not as good in my opinion.

Truth be told, if I had to hand grind the soap bar to make every batch of DIY laundry powder, I probably wouldn’t do it as it is quite tedious!

Homemade Laundry Powder

Instructions

1. Microwave the bar of Castile soap for 30 seconds. Turn the bar over and microwave for an additional 30 seconds. Repeat for an additional 30 seconds on each side.

2. Remove the softened bar from the microwave and coarsely cut it up into pieces while it is still hot.

3. Cool the cut soap pieces for 5-10 minutes.

4. Finely grate the still-warm, coarsely chopped soap pieces into soap flakes in a food processor.

5. Mix the borax, washing soda, and soap flakes in a half-gallon container. Close the lid tightly and turn several times to ensure it is blended thoroughly.

6. Use 2 tablespoons of this DIY laundry powder per medium load.