“Soap nuts? What are those? How are broken bits of shell supposed to get my clothes clean?”

All good questions you should be asking after your first exposure to this special nut. Technically a berry, soap nuts are lauded as one of the best environmentally conscious alternatives to chemical detergents and soaps. A highly prolific tree that can grow well in degraded environments, soap nut trees are considered by some to be a viable solution to global deforestation. And their cleaning potential? It’s considered almost limitless.

Sound a little hippy-dippy crazy? I thought so too. Actually I was completely skeptical. But I’m much more skeptical about turning down anything free, so when a sample package of Eco Nuts (a distributor of soap nuts) arrived in the mail I was willing to try them out. But first, I did some research.

Soap Nut Background Information

Though there are many species of soap nut tree, the mukorossi tree berry is the most common for the American market. They are native to China but have been thriving in India and Nepal for thousands of years. These trees grow well in poor soils and steep slopes. Other soap nut tree species such as trifoliatus and saponaria thrive in a range of climates from tropical to near desert. Mukorossi trees can live for a century and consistently produce prolific harvests of soap berries for over 80 years. Currently, the global demand for soap berries is nowhere near the plentiful supply and an estimated half of Mukorossi berries in Nepal are rotting off the tree.

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