Project Near Zero Waste

Since I've been doing the £100 a Year Beauty Challenge and have been using up my rather large stash of soap bars, I have been faced with the extremely serious dilemma of what to do with all those small bits of soap left from the bar that are difficult to use at the end of it's life.  I've been storing them up in a soap travel container, until there are enough of them to make up a new bar of soap.  It got me thinking and remembering how I used to have a soap saver many years ago, probably 25 years or so to be exact, when I was living at home with my parents.  I think I got it from the Betterware catalogue that was delivered regularly.

I  happily saved up all those little bits of soap from the bathroom and the soap saver began to fill up.  I was looking forward to creating a whole new bar, when one day it mysteriously disappeared.  I was a bit upset when I found out that my dad had thrown it away whilst cleaning the bathroom.  All that effort for nothing and I never got to make a single bar.

Anyway, with the advent of the wonderful internet and sites such as eBay I got to thinking the other day that I might be able to get hold of one again and sure enough a search of eBay resulted in me buying one.  Thinking I might be the only individual who purchases things like this, I decided to take a look at the list of how many the seller had sold recently and to my surprise they have been steadily selling them over the last few weeks.  Maybe I'm not the only one on a frugal near Zero Waste mission in 2014.

Now I know that it isn't really in the spirit of Zero Waste to buy something in order to reduce waste, but this was more of a nostalgic purchase, which will hopefully be useful in trying to minimise waste.  I paid £5.89 for it, quite a large percentage of which was the postage cost, so it will take a while for it to even pay for itself, but it was nice to be able to give this method of recycling another try after all those years.  As I do intend to carry on using bars of soap instead of shower gels and liquid hand washes (except in the kitchen in the case of the latter) in the future, hopefully I will make good use of it.  Here's a picture of it complete with instructions. 

I may have to put it somewhere safe this time so it doesn't get discarded again! 

Does or has anyone else used one of these before?