Physico-Chemical Characteristics of Some Ecological Products Used for Textile Care

Protecting the environment is an international issue that depends a lot on the involvement of each of us through actions to collect and recycle different used products. The purpose of this paper is to show that used cooking oils should be collected to be transformed into ecological laundry care products: soaps. The laundry soaps prepared by us were obtained through hot saponification processes, using the mixture of palm and coconut oils, unused and used/waste, in all 4 possible combinations. The characterization of the vegetable oils was carried out by determining the saponification value (SAP) and the iodine number (IN). The obtained soaps were characterized physically and chemically by determining pH, foam, color, density, cleaning/washing capacity inclusive the SAP, IN, INS (Iodine Number Saponification) values for oils mixture from soaps. The tested ecological soaps are excellent products for washing clothes because each has a low foaming and an excellent cleaning capacity.