Eco Caution — Don't Believe Everything You Think

Industrial Design: Eco Caution — Don't Believe Everything You think I stayed at a hotel recently that had soap in a box on the vanity countertop. Opening the box, I found an elliptical bar of soap with an elliptical hole in it — sort of an elliptical annulus. Puzzled, but suspecting some ecological significance, I read the box hoping to find an explanation. The box was the typical rough-textured, brown cardboard "made from natural recycled packaging printed with soy-based inks." The narrative further explained that the "soap is cruelty-free and contains no animal fat or by-products." And then the explanation for the hole: "This innovative ergonomically shaped 'waste-reducing' soap has been designed to eliminate the unused center of traditional bar soaps." All of these features are admirable efforts toward an ecologically sound and guilt-free bath experience. But the hole provides no "waste-reducing" quality. The thin sliver of soap left at the end of a traditional bar (which is eliminated by the hole in the green bar) is typically discarded because it is hard to handle in lathering the wash towel. But the elliptical soap with a hole dwindles down with use to one long sliver that is even more difficult to use and, in fact, easily breaks, leading to more waste than with a traditional holeless bar of soap. A much-better approach is to recognize that wet soap is soft and can easily be melded onto