You have water. It comes out of your tap. It costs barely eight øre per liter — a fraction of a cent.
And yet you pay to have it delivered in a plastic bottle with a pump on top.
Turn the bottle over. Ingredients are listed by quantity. Most first. The first ingredient in your liquid hand soap… Water. Aqua.
Liquid soap is sixty to seventy percent water. Some products up to eighty-four percent. That’s not a guess — it’s measured in a peer-reviewed study of commercial soaps, published in 2024.
Shampoo? Eighty percent water. Body wash? Eighty percent water. Dish soap? Same story.
You’re not buying soap. You’re buying water.
A bottle of liquid hand soap costs fifteen to twenty kroner for three hundred milliliters. Seventy percent is water. That’s two hundred and ten milliliters of water.
For the same money you could draw over two hundred liters from your own tap. Two hundred liters. For what you pay for two hundred and ten milliliters in a plastic bottle.
The figure for Danish tap water includes the wastewater levy. It comes from State of Green, the Danish state’s own platform for the green transition.
Water in a bottle is an ideal environment for bacteria, mold and yeast. Without preservatives, your liquid soap would spoil within weeks.
That’s why the ingredient list is long. Preservatives, because water has to be preserved. Stabilizers, because water is the world’s best solvent — and it also dissolves the very things the industry wants to hold together. Fragrance, because water smells of nothing. Half the ingredient list exists only because there’s water in the bottle.
No water? No preservatives needed. No bacterial growth. Nothing to stabilize.
That’s the logic behind a solid soap.
One pump of liquid soap weighs about two point three grams. One wash with solid soap uses zero point two five to zero point three five grams. You use seven times more product with liquid soap — and most of what goes down the drain is the water you already had in your tap.
The numbers are from a comparison published by Anthropocene Magazine, which also found that liquid soap’s climate footprint is twenty-five percent larger per wash than solid soap. Switching one hundred bottles of liquid soap to solid soap saves three hundred and twenty-eight kilos of CO2 — a reduction of ninety-six percent.
Three hundred and twenty-eight kilos. From soap.
In recent years, more brands have started selling “concentrated refills.” Diluted one to four with water at home.
Think about what they’re admitting. If you have to dilute it one to four, the original product was seventy-five percent water. They’re now selling you the option of adding your own water — the water you already have.
They knew it all along. Now it’s just become a feature. And they call it innovation.
Our soap contains no water. Well — we use distilled water in production. But it’s almost entirely saponified away during the process. During the six weeks of curing, the rest evaporates. The finished bar keeps only a fraction of the original water.
What’s left is concentrated. Fat that has become soap. Glycerin that has stayed in the soap. No filler. No transporting water around in plastic.
One bar at eighty-nine kroner lasts four to eight weeks. For hands, face, body, hair. And yes — for dishes.
Liquid soap and solid soap are not two versions of the same thing. They’re two different categories. One is mostly water with a little surfactant. The other is mostly soap.
They sit on the same shelf in the supermarket. That’s where the confusion starts.
Denmark recycles twenty-three percent of its plastic packaging. Among the lowest in the EU. That figure is from Eurostat, 2022. Every bottle of liquid soap you buy is a new bottle. Filled with water you already had.
You’re not buying soap when you buy liquid hand soap. You’re buying a pump full of water.