IS PINEAPPLE BETTER THAN SOAP?

IS PINEAPPLE BETTER THAN SOAP?

By Shantol Edwards

Hold on guys now before you swear or curse me out because of the title of this article.. Hear me out .. I’m not some hippie telling you to go around smelling like a cheese ball but am just saying hey maybe there are other ways we can clean ourselves other than the hygiene products on the market. half of every pineapple you eat ends up in the trash. The skin and core can be composted but there is one company that turns fruit scraps into natural soap and cleaners.

The founder Le Duy Hoang says they're safer for the planet and people, it's so safe that he drinks the stuff every day.Fermented fruit is part of a new trend of cleaning with enzymes instead of harsh chemicals, but some of you may be asking yourself does this really work or is it some other way of saving the planet mumbo jumbo blah blah blah…… Throughout history people have used all sorts of stuff to wash up everything from human urine to animal fat ( YUCK!). In recent years scientists learnt how to make suds in a lab using fossil fuels that paved the way for all kinds of cleaning chemicals which are all detergents, and we do have to admit they have made life a lot cleaner and hygienic but the difference is that water treatment plants weren't built to clean phosphorus and other chemicals from our waste water. When those ingredients flood streams, they can accelerate algal growth, resulting in thick layers of muck that smother aquatic life.(Returning to the pineapple cleaning products,) The Fuwa firm purchases fruit waste from a facility that manufactures canned pineapple, and workers here cut hundreds of them every day. The pineapple trash used to decay in neighboring landfills, emitting unpleasant odors and methane; today, employees load the scraps into a truck and drive approximately two miles to the manufacturing facility, where the crew unloads and washes the fruit leftovers. They then combine sugar and water. (And no, they're not creating pineapple juice) Each month, the process consumes around two metric tons of sugar.

Workers add the pineapple peels to the sugar water and wait for germs like bacteria or yeast to begin breaking down complicated compounds like sugar into alcohol. At Fuwa, waste is fermented into cleaning fluids, but the secret isn't alcohol, but the enzymes and acids released by the pineapples. Enzymes, which speed up chemical events in the human body such as digestion, may combat germs by entering cells and tearing them apart from the inside, which can either kill bacteria or slow them down enough that they won't make you sick.Workers here stir the mixture every day after about a month, by two months this glob of bacteria and microorganisms forms that's how you know it's working the founders don't keep any of their process a secret Hoang says he learned this technique from a scientist and Buddhist nun who figured out the formula then shared it freely for others to use. After the mixture ferments for three months there's enough acid and enzymes for it to work as a cleaner now it's ready to be filtered for use.

The leftover solids are used to fertilize farms, and the residual liquid is used to make all of their cleaning products. The finished product is bottled and sent to small Marts throughout Vietnam, as well as online clients in most countries. A bottle of dish soap costs little more than two bucks. According to Hoang, this is cheaper than the cost of comparable imported items. Cleaning with fermented fruit is a relatively new concept, but there is evidence that it has a lot of potential. For example, researchers compared a pineapple enzyme mixture to bleach in water and discovered that it killed one type of bacteria equally well, and preliminary research suggests that fruit enzymes might even make wastewater cleaner, so could we one day replace household bleach and detergents with fermented pineapples?

Although fruit enzyme cleansers are excellent, efficient enzyme cleaners have a short shelf life. One of the biggest difficulties is that it may become inactive at certain temperatures. Fuwa claims that their products have a two-year lifespan, which is comparable to the lifespan of most chemical cleaning sprays. Fuwa has more work to do because the region has a lot of pineapple processing, and the firm claims it has a lot of trash to work with, but the founders primarily want people to know there's a cleaner soap and detergent option, so they're keen to spread the word. Now ask yourself Would you take a shower with a bar of pineapple instead of soap? Let me rephrase that: Would you shower with a bar of organically fermented pineapple cleaner than a bar of synthetic soap?