Bar Soap vs. Body Wash: Which is More Eco-friendly?

September 15, 2026

For many people, an important factor to consider when choosing between bar soap and liquid body wash is how eco-friendly it is. Is the product heavy to ship? Does it create packaging waste? Is it made with ingredients that can harm aquatic life? Does it create unnecessary carbon emissions? While I can't answer these questions for every individual product, I can give you the answers that are true for most bar soaps (and specifically for Fat Chance Soap!) and most body washes.

Shipping and Packaging: Solids vs Liquids

The most obvious benefit of bar soaps is that solids are inherently easier to ship and package in a minimalistic way. Almost all of the shipping weight of a bar of soap is made up of the product that you will be using, while liquid body washes must also have a container.

If you use plastic, you save on shipping weight but are creating a disposable plastic bottle for every item you sell. Many plastics can be recycled but we still have to account for the energy used to manufacture the bottle and the additional energy to transport and process the bottle for recycling.

Then there is the fact that many plastics are never recycled, even if they make it onto the recycling truck. The recycling rate of plastics varies widely by type of plastic with recycling numbers 1 (PETE) and 2 (HDPE) being the most recycled types [3]. The good news is that most body wash containers are indeed made with #1 or #2 plastic. However, the actual recycling rate for #1 plastic (the most recycled type!) is still only 52% in the EU and just 31% in the US [3]. That still leaves a lot of plastic waste in the landfill or in the ocean.

Many people prefer glass over plastic as an eco-friendly packaging option but glass comes with its own baggage. The main issues being that glass is heavy and fragile. It takes more energy to ship glass than plastic and you will end up with more broken, cracked or otherwise unsaleable containers once it arrives.

Glass is also very energy intensive both to manufacture from virgin materials and to crush and remelt for recycling. Glass furnaces must reach over 2700F to make new glass [4]. Recycled glass can be melted at slightly cooler temperatures, but that results in only a 30% energy savings if the glass is made with nearly 100% recycled material. Not all glass can be made with this much recycled content, such as clear glass, which can have no more than 60% recycled material [4].

Then there is the fact that depending on where you live, not much glass gets recycled. In the US we recycle a paltry 30% or so of glass (mainly due to contamination and breakage issues from single stream recycling), India recycles 45% [5] and the EU average is 74% [4].

bins of crushed glass, photo by Kasper Kuivalainen

Then there's bar soap, which requires little to no packaging at all! I offer all of my soaps with the option of getting them with or without labels, so you can even further reduce your packaging footprint, if you like. Even large retail brands of soap, which may wrap their bars in plastic or put them in individual boxes, are using much less packaging than a body wash bottle.

We should also consider the water weight in liquid products. Look at the ingredients on these items and you will find that water (or perhaps "aqua") is the first ingredient. Water is heavy, so that's a lot of extra weight that has to be shipped around. Especially since you probably have water at home, so a concentrated cleanser like a bar of soap makes a lot more sense.

Biodegradable or Not?

Another concern is what happens to your soap or body wash once it's done its job and is washed down the drain. Products made from biodegradable ingredients break down very readily in waste processing plants or as greywater in the soil (but still don't use soap or body wash near rivers, lakes and streams!)

While the main ingredients in body wash, like surfactants and moisturizing oils, are readily biodegradable, they are also more likely to contain problematic ingredients. The preservative EDTA persists in water sources even after processing at a treatment plant [6]. The artificial dyes, fragrances and microplastic beads that many body washes contain are also environmentally suspect and often can't be processed or filtered out at sewage treatment plants [7].

Like body wash, the surfactants and oils in bar soap are biodegradable. The big advantage, in my experience, is that bar soaps with no synthetic dyes, fragrances or preservatives are much easier to find. Any product with water in it must contain preservatives to prevent the growth of unpleasant or potentially dangerous bacteria. Once soap is cured and ready for use it doesn't contain water and thus does not need a preservative to prevent bacterial growth.

Natural colors and essential oils, like the ones I use in my soaps, have the benefit of being biodegradable. Not all essential oils are create equally though and some of them require vast amounts of plant material and thus vast amounts of agricultural land to produce. I go into more detail about that here.

Although it takes a little more effort, it is very possible to find biodegradable body washes. Those that are will typically say it on their label or in their marketing. These products are often advertised as great for camping or outdoor use (not in bodies of water though). But here's the thing, ingredients that aren't biodegradable are difficult or impossible to remove from waste water even in sewage treatment plants. So biodegradable products are important even for use at home.

Pushing Back Against "Green washing"

So I think I coined a new term while writing this article and that is: "waste-based". In the soap world, it's very popular for products to be advertised as plant-based (i.e. they use no petroleum products) and/or vegan (they use no animal products.) What I think is more important to consider when deciding what ingredients are more environmentally friendly is if those ingredients are primarily grown or manufactured to go into body products or if they are leftovers from another industry that might go to waste otherwise. I bet you can guess which one is more sustainable.

And yeah, ok, I don't think folks are going to be rushing out to buy "waste-based" soap anytime soon (the term doesn't exactly give me "clean" vibes either) but I think it's an important consideration, especially for someone like me who doesn't fall neatly into the usual eco-friendly marketing categories, as tallow and lard are distinctly neither plant-based nor vegan! Tallow and lard are however definitely waste-based in my context.

The animal fats that I purchase from Vermont and New York farmers are typically a hard sell to the farm's usual customer base. While a small subset of people have embraced cooking with animal fats, there's not nearly enough demand to use it up and sell it out regularly. People are just more interested in pork chops and ground beef than lard and tallow! So rather than composting it or selling it at deep discount, farmers can sell these fats at a decent price and know that they are going to good use.

This principle applies to plant and petroleum derived products too. I know petroleum is a bit of dirty word in natural body care circles but as far as sustainability is concerned, it's not all as bad as you might think. Petrolatum, or petroleum jelly, is a by product of oil production, which means no one is drilling oil just to get it, and it can be refined to remove the carcinogenic compounds associated with crude oil [8]. As long as our economy depends at least somewhat on oil, petrolatum will be produced. Why not use it to make petroleum jelly instead of throwing it away? And while it isn't biodegradable, petrolatum is insoluble in water and floats, which means it can be pretty effectively removed from wastewater at treatment plants [9].

This doesn't necessarily apply to all petroleum derived products and many of them produce some nasty by products during manufacture, but I think it shows how hard it in to put ingredients into strict categories of "good" or "bad".

It's tempting to lump everything "natural" under the umbrella of "good" and all "chemicals" as "bad" but it's never that simple!

Plant-based oils, for example, are often grown and produced primarily for use in body products. Coconut oil, palm oil, sunflower oil and more all require valuable agricultural land to produce. These are also food crops that could otherwise be eaten by humans or livestock. Also, land in agricultural production is typically managed by fuel burning tractors and trucks, making these oils less "petroleum free" than they appear. And yes, animal agriculture also requires tractors but since that fuel is burnt primarily in service of making food, I think we can assign a slightly smaller slice of the burden on the waste-product (animal fat) that results.

But plant oils can be waste-based too! Cocoa butter is a byproduct of processing cocoa for chocolate (though chocolate has its own ethical and sustainability concerns). Castor bean oil is derived from beans inedible to humans or livestock and can grow on marginal land unsuitable for other crops. Wheat germ oil is a byproduct of the wheat milling industry, to name a few.

Use Less

My goal here is not to make buying sustainable even more complicated (though probably I have anyway, oops!) You are never going to find the perfect product that heals the earth through its very existence. In fact here is my ultimate advice: the difference in sustainability between products is FAR less meaningful than the difference between a product that exists and one that doesn't.

In simple terms, nothing is more sustainable than the product you don't buy in the first place. This is the eco-friendly advice that you will never hear from the big brands because their ultimate goal is for you to buy their product and buy lots of it. If making that product seem as green as possible is what it takes, then they'll do that. Sustainable products still have an impact. That impact may be less but it's still there.

Once again, I don't want to cast guilt and shame upon every purchase you make. Body care products can help make us happy and comfortable in our skin, which is a feeling that everyone deserves! But try an experiment sometime to see which products you actually need for your skin to feel good. Maybe you use multiple moisturizers when one will do just fine; maybe you lather, rinse and repeat like the shampoo bottle says but washing once is more than enough; maybe you don't always need to use soap in your daily shower or maybe you don't even need to shower daily?

In a world where reduce, reuse, recycle is more relevant than ever, remember that "reduce" is in first place for good reason.