Natural environment: Hair and water

It's been a while since I started to check the ingredients on shampoo and soap for gelatin and other animal products; recently I also took interest in the health aspect of veg*nism and overall "greenness." After going through a few lists of toxic, cancerogenic, and plain potentially harmful (whatever that might imply) ingredients,most of which have unpronounceable and impossible-to-remember names, commonly found in shampoo and soap, I decided to search for an easy alternative - some product that would right off the bat have ingredients that are easily understandable, of course animal-product free and, last but not least readily available; methodically reading through hundreds of ingredient lists in dozens of natural product stores did not seem a glorious passtime.

-> Hair
The alternative found was ridiculously simple and effective: "no 'poo" method. Dissolve one tablespoon of baking soda in water, and use instead of shampoo. To replace conditioner, dissolve a tablespoon of apple cider vinegar in a cup of water and rinse your hair with it. Done! My hair feels just as clean as with some fancy shampoo, and takes way more time to get grease than before. The only drawback - showering now resembles cooking...

I haven't found a working replacement for soap yet (may be baking soda, this tofu of the cleaning world, can work too?), but stopped using the liquid kind, since all-natural bars are much easier to find.

-> Water

Since all these explorations were mainly driven by environmental concerns, I started to look for ways to "green up" the whole showering process:

1. The simplest thing: cut down the shower time. Saves water and energy.

2. To make the water warmer, turn down the cold water, instead of adding hot.

3. Turn down the temperature in general; it will save energy needed to heat the water, will probably make you get out of the shower faster and you wouldn't need to use a fan, since there will be less steam.

4. Navy shower: turn on the water, get wet, turn off the water, soap up and scrub, turn the water back on and rinse.

5. Collect the water in a bucket while waiting for it to warm up and use to water plants, flush the toilet or anything else (ok, I don't do that... yet!)

6. Go with soda and vinegar thing: less packaging and production waste from shampoo, less chemicals washed down the drain.