Let’s be honest. We put a ton of chemicals with names we can’t pronounce into our bodies every day, and most of them probably aren’t good for us.

And we’re not just talking about pink slime burgers from McDonald’s…we’re talking about many of our household cleaning products as well. Especially laundry detergent!

It’s easy to go to the grocery store to grab your favorite brand of laundry detergent, but many of these store-bought brands contain toxic chemicals that are harmful to you and your family.

So what’s the solution? Make your own, of course!

Homemade laundry detergent is free of toxic chemicals and will cost you less, too.

Below we’ve outlined a simple, commonly used recipe for homemade powder laundry detergent that will spare you health problems and wasted money. Check it out.

Ingredients You’ll Need

One of the nice things about making your own laundry detergent is that you can still find the ingredients you need at the grocery store and probably mostly all in the same place.

This recipe calls for only three ingredients:

• 1 cup washing soda
• 1 cup borax
• 1 shaved bar of your preferred bar soap

Procedure For Making Your Own Laundry Detergent

Making your own powder laundry detergent is actually not complicated at all. The most involved process is shaving your bar of soap.

For this task, most people employ the shaving abilities of a cheese grater. Simply shave off little curls from your bar of soap as you would with any kind of block cheese and you’re good to go.

Once you’re done with this, take the 1 cup of washing soda, 1 cup of borax, and bar soap shavings and mix them together in a medium-sized mixing bowl.

From here you can add the mixture to any kind of airtight storage container you wish. Some people use plastic sandwich bags, some people use cookie jars. Get creative!

How to Use Your New DIY Laundry Detergent

The amount of detergent to use per load of laundry is open to user interpretation, but the general rule of thumb is to use 1 tablespoon of powder detergent for each load of laundry.

Feel free to use a little bit more for extra-dirty loads of laundry. The recipe above should make enough homemade laundry detergent for roughly 64 loads of laundry.

Benefits of Homemade Laundry Detergent

Obviously, one of the main reasons we recommend homemade laundry detergent is to avoid the health risks posed by many brand-name detergents. But making your own detergent has other benefits as well.

Not everybody has a septic tank in their backyard, but for those who do, homemade laundry detergent is ideal. This detergent won’t clog up your pipes, and it also won’t break down the good bacteria that septic tanks need in order to do their job. Brand-name detergents do both of those things, but most people won’t tell you that.

Big-name laundry detergents will cost you an arm and a leg. It is actually cheaper to buy your own detergent ingredients and make it yourself than to buy either liquid or powder detergents at the store. Some homesteaders report saving up to $0.16 per load. That adds up quickly to big savings!

Stop pumping your body full of poisons and save money. The extra time it takes to do so is insignificant, and the benefits are huge.