Cheap Way to Collect Soap - a Necessary Survival Item

 Image courtesy of Marin at Free Digital photos

Wouldn't it be great if we could still have running water, soaps and towels during the Apocalypse? It's not gonna happen like that but we can still find ways to keep clean.

In fact it's important to stay clean to ward off disease. Disease can kill many of those who have stored enough food and water to keep going.

If you don't consider cleanliness, you're doomed. You'll end up with lice, scabies and other contagions brought on by being dirty.

Someone gets the flu, or a cold or something worse - guess what? You want to stop the spread of those germs and the first defence is hand washing. Of course you also want to be able to wash your entire body as often as possible to avoid skin contagions.

Yes you'll probably buy soap (bars, liquid, dish etc) and store some with your food supplies but have you thought about what happens when your supply of soap runs out? Do you know how to make soap? Do you have the ingredients for making soap? Do you know what plants, if any, grow wild that can be used for soap?

4 months worth of soap bits

I don't know how to make soap and the one plant I know of that can be used as a soap substitute doesn't grow in our area. So I need another plan.

I won't pretend I have the perfect backup plan. I don't. But what I do have is almost 150 bars of hand soap which my wife buys on sale whenever she sees it.  We also have about 10 bottles of liquid soap requiring no water. Guess what? It's not enough! But it becomes a toss-up on a limited prepper budget as to whether that bag of rice is more important than several bars of hand soap.

Since we like to figure out how to add to our survival stores without going broke, my wife and I save all those little nubs of soap. You know the ones that get to be about the size of a quarter or smaller and so you toss them out? Well, we started saving ours last year. Wish we'd thought of it sooner!

Everyone in our survival community (certain family members) is saving their soap ends. You will be amazed at how quickly it grows. And we'll be darn glad to have it when our full-size bars of soap run out!

So don't overlook budget ways to gather supplies you will need if there is a long-term emergency. Start saving those soap bits now! My wife puts them in a soap dish until they dry out then she tosses them into a ziplock bag. We have 4 ziplock sandwich bags full now. Doesn't sound like a lot but that's from only 2 of us in the household.