Yesterday I collected together the remains of the four solid-stick deodorants which I'd amassed since last year, dug out what remained in each container, zapped it in the microwave (for only a few seconds - having learnt from my mistake last year) and poured the resulting liquid back into one of the deodorant containers. A couple of hours of cooling and voila!
A good amount of reusable deodorant. Here's what I had to say about the same experiment last year.
I tried out a bit of an experiment over the weekend too. Whilst re-reading The Complete Tightwad Gazette book recently I came across a tip for getting the most out of stick deodorants. P and I both use the same type of deodorant - Tom's of Maine nature's deodorant stick - as it is aluminium free. This is a lovely deodorant to use but is rather expensive and it had been driving both of us mad that so much of it was wasted by being too far down to use. P had tried scraping the remnants out of an old stick and sticking it to the top of a new one but that didn't work as the old deodorant just crumbled away. The tip in The Tightwad Gazette suggested scraping out all the old deodorant from a few used sticks (we had three with only the dregs left), putting them in a glass bowl and zapping it in the microwave. Once the deodorant is liquid again tip it back into one of the empty deodorant sticks, wait for it to cool and harden and it can be reused. I was a bit sceptical of all this but thought it was worth giving it a go. So I duly zapped the scrapings in the microwave - I think I overdid this part as the microwave was full of steam when I opened the door (I would check after every 10 seconds when I do this again), poured the liquid into one of the sticks and voila, next morning about 1/4 of a stick is now usable again.
This year I ended up with even more re-usable deodorant. There's probably two reasons for that - 1. I had four lots of 'dregs' this year as opposed to three last year, and 2. because I'd learnt to only microwave for a very short time a lot less of the deodorant evaporated as steam.
With these particular deodorant sticks costing almost £4.00 each I want to waste as little as possible. I reckon the five minutes or so it took me to do this saved me at least £2.00. And it meant that the empty plastic containers could go into the recycling - something I wouldn't have wanted to do if there was still deodorant in them.
Toms of Maine is our favorite brand too and you are right. That is too much waste for that price. I'm going to give this a try next time we have a few empty ones. I need to pull out her book again and start reading from the beginning.
Posted by: Selena | 05/17/2008 at 02:44 PM