I bought an old pioneer home owned by hoarders and discovered gallons of Palmolive dish soap from 30 years ago. One drop can clean a greasy pot. Now, with new soap, one drop can’t even clean a glass cup. What has happened? Why are all our dishwashing soaps and hair shampoos full of gel? What is this gel made of, and why are we agreeing to this?

What Are These Gels Made Of?

The thickening agents in modern dish soaps are typically synthetic polymers, petroleum-based compounds, or plant-derived cellulose. Common ingredients include:

Sodium Chloride (Salt): Used to thicken surfactant mixtures, but primarily a cheap filler.

Xanthan Gum & Cellulose Gum: Plant-derived thickeners that create a gel-like consistency.

Carbomer & Acrylates Copolymer: Synthetic polymers that help stabilize the formula and create a thick texture.

PEG (Polyethylene Glycol): A petroleum-based compound used to emulsify and thicken soap.

While some of these ingredients are harmless, others contribute to unnecessary waste and pollution. Many are simply cheap replacements for higher-quality, concentrated formulas that once existed.

The Environmental Downsides of Thicker Dish Soaps

Excessive Packaging Waste

With gels taking up more space in a bottle, manufacturers need larger plastic containers to hold the same amount of active cleaning agents. This leads to more plastic waste, contributing to pollution and landfill overflow. A truly concentrated dish soap in a smaller bottle would drastically reduce plastic consumption.

Increased Transportation Emissions

Bulkier, heavier bottles require more energy to produce and transport. More packaging and unnecessary weight mean higher carbon emissions from shipping and distribution. A more compact, concentrated formula would be more efficient and sustainable.

Unnecessary Water Usage

Many modern dish soaps contain fillers that do little more than add bulk. This means consumers are paying for diluted products that use more water during manufacturing. If companies focused on ultra-concentrated formulas, they could significantly reduce their water footprint.

More Chemical Additives

To maintain their thick consistency, many modern dish soaps contain synthetic thickeners and stabilizers. These chemicals don’t always break down easily in wastewater treatment systems and can contribute to water pollution, harming aquatic ecosystems.

Alternatives: Dish Soaps Without Gelling Agents

If you’re looking for effective dishwashing soaps that skip the unnecessary gelling agents, here are some great options available in the U.S.:

Seventh Generation Free & Clear Liquid Dish Soap – A plant-based, fragrance-free soap that’s biodegradable and free from dyes and synthetic fragrances.

ECOS Hypoallergenic Dish Soap – Biodegradable, hypoallergenic, and gentle on hands, while remaining tough on grease.

ATTITUDE Dishwashing Liquid – EWG Verified and vegan, made with naturally derived ingredients and free from dyes and synthetic fragrances.

Sonett Organic Dishwashing Liquid – A concentrated, organic, biodegradable formula that’s gentle on skin and the environment.

A Call for Smarter Dish Soap Design

The shift toward gel-based dish soaps may have been driven by marketing rather than necessity. Thicker soaps create the illusion of being more concentrated, but in reality, they often contain unnecessary fillers that don’t enhance cleaning power. Consumers who care about sustainability should push for more concentrated formulas that require less packaging, use fewer resources, and reduce waste. There are some companies that make dry soap bars for shampoo. Can that work with dishwashing soap for washing dishes manually?

Would you switch to a truly concentrated dish soap in a smaller bottle if it were available? Or maybe we need to demand the value we once had in a larger bottle? The solution to this problem starts with consumer demand. By choosing brands that prioritize sustainability over gimmicky formulations, we can encourage the industry to rethink its approach and reduce its environmental impact.

The post Why Are All the Dishwashing Soaps Diluted with Gel? appeared first on Green Prophet.

We buy them at health food stores because the ceramic coated pans are supposedly safer than teflon, and good for the planet. A new investigative report by an Israeli consumer protection TV show called Kolbotek finds that ceramic cookware may damaging to your health, and could contain lead and cadmium, which cause a number of serious medical problems such as brain damage (especially in small children), and certain types of cancer. The problem is with the lack of regulation on the materials used to color the pots and pans, and these colors made with cadmium and lead, can leak into your food.

Color coated knives were also found to contain toxic metals

Various brands of ceramic cookware were tested by Kolbotek in an environmental testing laboratory Enviro Services Company (ESC), located next to Israel’s notorious hazardous wastes disposal site Ramat Hovav.

The tests found that certain ceramic cookware brands (not mentioned here due to reasons of sensitivity) contained amounts of toxic metals far above “accepted levels” (levels that do not constitute a danger to human health unless absorbed in large quantities).

Even some so called “green guard” brands using a coating called Neoflam were found to contain low levels of these metals, which might warrant then not to be used.

Kobotek also interviewed some prominent toxicologists to obtain their opinions on the dangers from using these products. One of these toxicologists is Professor Yoni Amitai a former Senior Physician at the Hadassah University Hospital in Jerusalem, and Director of  the Department of Mother, Child and Adolescent Health at the Ministry of Health. Amitai said that utensils containing high amounts of metals like lead and cadmium should not be used, especially for families with children.

While the nonstick coatings make these utensils very nice to use, the lab tests found that heating the utensils to very high temperatures, such as done when frying foods of a high fire, releases toxins from metals and other substances at a much faster rate.

The coated knives were found to release toxic substances when scratched or chipped.

A link to the entire Kolbotek program, aired on Israel’s Channel 2 TV of Monday, December 26, was posted here. But by March, 2020 it was no longer there.

The program did not say that all ceramic, non stick coated cookware is dangerous, but that some brands that contain high amounts of the mentioned metals should be avoided.

The general consensus from the program is for people to avoid using these ceramic coated utensils, even those considered as “safe”.

This is not the first time that consumers have been warned to avoid using utensils with nonstick coatings. Warnings against use of those with “teflon” non stick coatings have been issues for years, and also in the USA warnings against nonstick utensils have been issued.

Maybe the best idea it to stick to good quality stainless steel utensils; or even better, to use that old cast iron skillet and cooking pot or dutch oven, and use lots of “elbow grease” to clean them afterwards.

Consumer protection programs have made us more aware of products that may be dangerous to human health. Some of these products already mentioned on Green Prophet include a food substance known as meat glue (transglutaminase), an article giving  warnings of possible toxic contraceptives; and a brand of silicone breast implants, PIP, that have been recalled by the French government for fears of leaks that could cause cancer.

In short: buyer beware if you want to protect your health.

UPDATE article (Jan 2): Public Launches Class Action Suit Against Neoflam

More articles on dangerous products you should watch out for:
PIP Breast Implant Warnings Hit the Middle East
Is Conscious contraception site selling a bag of dirty tricks?
The Meat You Eat May Not be What You Think
Meat Glue (transglutaminase): the meat industry’s dirty secret

The post Ceramic Coated Cooking Pans May be Killing You With Color appeared first on Green Prophet.

After ten years in Israel, what is Ikea’s regional legacy?

When the Swedish affordable home furnishing company, Ikea, came to Israel ten years ago, it filled a void.  The store filled the need for a more approachable, affordable place for Israelis to furnish their homes and experiment with interior design.  Former Ikea Israel CEO Dov Rochman even called the opening of the country’s first Ikea store a revolution in Israeli furniture and design awareness.

Ten years later, Ikea has proven to increase design consciousness and Bracha Kunda, the head of the interior design department at the Holon Institute of Technology, said recently that “Ikea made interior design more accessible to the broader public, and brought it down to the people, but not in a bad sense.  It increased design awareness in Israel and made it more part of mass culture.”

But what about sustainable design awareness?  Is it just about saving money in our wallets? The past ten years have brought about great advances in sustainable interior design, including some local cardboard furniture options for both kids and adults.

When faced with a choice between cheap, new, readily available furniture from Ikea or more expensive, potentially upcycled, and harder-to-find sustainable design options from local designers, though, is it any wonder that the majority of Israelis aren’t jumping on the green furniture design trend?

Instead, for the most part, Israelis are flocking towards cheap, colorful, trendy furniture pieces from Ikea, which are cheap on their wallets but environmentally expensive.  Sure, Ikea furniture comes in flat-packed boxes that save room and energy during shipping, but you can’t expect any durability from that Billy bookcase in your living room.

Maybe Ikea hasn’t been all bad for the sustainable interior design movement, though.  If people have greater design consciousness, then surely some of them will gravitate towards sustainable design as well.

Noga Friedlander, the director of marketing at Tollman’s (a high-end home furnishings company), seems optimistic.  “Ikea educates younger people to like and demand design,” she said, “so that when they are a bit older they are better prepared to understand differences and want better things. It makes them aware of design and its advantages, and afterward people are more prepared to pay more to have the real thing.”

“The biggest disadvantage of Ikea is quality,” said Friedlander.  “But, again, they bring a relatively high level of design to a young audience, which afterward seeks this from higher quality companies.”

Hopefully this young audience will be looking for high quality sustainable design as well.

:: Haaretz

Read more about sustainable furniture design:
Krooom Makes Recycled and Recyclable Cardboard Furniture For Kids of All Ages
Studio Mesila is Paving the Track to Sustainable Design
Amir Zinaburg’s Recycled Designs Can-Can

Image via: OiMax

The post Ikea Increases Israeli Design Awareness, but What About Sustainable Design? appeared first on Green Prophet.

An American marketing extraordinaire, Jen Drexler knows what women want. She also knows what they aren’t telling!

Along with her partner Mary Lou Quinlan, Jen founded Just Ask a Woman more than a decade ago, a marketing firm that helps brands understand and better serve female consumers.

We first learned of her through The National, where she discusses the concept of “green-ish” – a term based on the notion that women often say one thing (the Half Truth) but do another (the Whole Truth). In an interview, she tells us how women often “talk a big game around green but don’t necessarily follow through,” and how we can influence them to be more green.

Jen, can you tell us a bit about your role at Just Ask a Woman?

I co-founded our company 12 years ago with our CEO Mary Lou Quinlan.  My primary roles are servicing our consulting clients and developing content for our books, speeches and blogs.

We heard about you through a story published in The National. Ann Marie McQueen discusses formerly eco-friendly expats who “backslide” in the UAE as a result of have access to fewer “green” resources. What is the challenge facing them?

I guess my question is are they really backsliding because of fewer resources? My hunch is that they may backslide because it is easier and less expensive to not go green or they just don’t rank it as high on their value system.

You note that one of the solutions is to become “greenish.” Can you explain this to our readers?

I wouldn’t say being Green-ish is a solution but rather that it is an inevitable truth for real women living in a real world.  Women want to do the right thing by their families and their environment but have to make daily compromises because of their financial resources.  Green products generally cost more so women will prioritize the areas in her life where they are the most important.

What, in your opinion, is so hard about going “green”? Is this a marketing failure? A government failure to provide adequate resources to make smarter choices, or is this good ol’ fashioned laziness?

I think it comes down to cost and quality.  Do organic cleansers work as well as the ones filled with chemicals? Not usually.  And even if they did Americans have been trained to associate the smell of products like bleach with cleanliness and with the absence of that sensory signal they doubt the efficacy of their green cleaners.

As a marketing guru who best understands how women make consumer choices, what can we do in the Middle East to influence women to make more responsible choices?

You have to understand the barriers to green for her and then look for the opportunities to overcome them.  If there aren’t enough products on shelf for her to choose from think about ways to help her make her own (water & vinegar as a cleanser, baking soda as a stain remover…)

And lastly, from a marketing perspective, how do we know we’re winning?

When women feel like they have more in their repertoire that is green versus not. Shifting the balance will be the signal that progress is being made.

More Interviews on Green Prophet:

From Rockstarts to Recycling: Interview with Kristiane Backer

Eco-Sexuality of Tantra: Interview with Israeli Relationship Specialists

Interview with Abu Dhabi’s Most Innovative Design Couple

The post Women going green appeared first on Green Prophet.