The way I think of it is: can you use plastic ware for food after washing it in soap? Can you use containers after using it with baking soda(not as strong base as NaOH, but still similar)? Do you use coffee carafe/pots after cleaning it out with CLR(more similar to NAOH)? If your answer is yes to all, then yes will be your answer.

I would stay clear of it, regardless, just for safety sake and for two very good reasons.

Plastic especially because it does have a tendency to absorb what has been put into it. If you’ve ever put anything with tomato in a plastic tub for any length of time, no matter how little of it is in a recipe, that tomato will stain it. That stain is something not only being left behind from the tomato, but has been absorbed into the plastic. Usually, soaking it in a little bleach water or laying it out in the sun during a bright sunny day will get rid of most of it. But, really. . . I wouldn’t risk it.

Secondly, specifically for those of us who might think about using second hand items for their soap making, there is an even more serious problem to consider –– drug making, especially methamphetamine.

There have been a growing number of cases of people becoming sick from using cooking pots, slow cookers, etc., purchased second hand. Sadly, they were victims of someone having used those pots for making meth in, and then stupidly or more likely intentionally donating those things to thrift stores. How was it found that cooking pots had been used for making meth? In the process of narrowing down the possibilities of what and how it was that people had become so sick, the pots and utensils used for cooking the last meals eaten prior to an incident became suspect. In testing the surfaces of the pots, etc., it was found that all if not many of the chemical residues used for making meth were present within the pot’s interior.

That leaves one other issue regarding using used cooking pots whose origins you cannot be sure of. It may not be a good idea to use them for soap making either. I don’t know if it would affect the chemicals and ingredients used in the process or not, but I would be more concerned about it leaching into the soap as it is made and then transferring to yours or whomever’s skin when using it after. To say the list of ingredients commonly used in this garbage is disturbing is an understatement.

We live in an increasingly sad and degrading society. The kind of drugs used today not only differ in potency and effects from fifty years ago, but attitudes toward their usage are becoming almost blasé and normalized. I learned of all this because my mother was living in a low-income senior independent living building where meth was being made –– yes, in senior living apartments. In the past five to ten years, this has become an increasing problem. People tend to not think of such a place as one where drugs would be made and sold (it can be a complicated yet ingenious way of going about it when you think on it). What complicates the problem is how we generally see seniors today as being like the seniors of our grandparents and great-grandparent’s era. We forget that today’s seniors were in their late teens and early twenties at the height of the social revolution of the sixties and seventies. That era and the times that came after were quite different from the decades prior. Their outlook and attitudes on life can be rather different from those of seniors, whose heyday was during the Great Wars, the Depression, and the growth of the middle class during the fifties. Many in those generations have left us, with those who remain soon to follow.

So, when those poor souls living in these buildings where this is taking place begin to suffer healthwise and die, it conveniently looks like just the expected natural process of old age. This is expected in a senior only apartment building –– they’re old, and they’re expected to pass, but few think to blame it on the fumes and chemical residues of drug manufacturing.

Anyway, enough about this as it is depressing to talk about and worse to share. Little is being done because so much funding has been cut for fire and safety on a federal level. And no, it isn’t Biden who did it, that has been going on quietly for decades by the conservative party in congress with the support of the same in the Oval Office. The money gets diverted to the military for the sake of raising stock values of the corporations who’ve won contracts with the military, thus increasing the wealth of those representatives who own them. There have been attempts to make it illegal to profit from supporting legislation that benefits one’s stock portfolio, but curiously, one Party in particular has been successful in beating it. Again, enough. . . I mention this just to point out how politics really does affect us all. It may not do so in the immediate sense, but give a year or two or three –– a decade even, and it will have in widespread ways. With that, I will make one last recommendation. If in doubt as to who supports what or doesn’t or who even bothers to show up to vote on a bill, just go to the congressional site and look things up. It is all there, in real time, and for almost every serving member as far back as there are records for. Trusting in any other source is just feeding a bias that gets no one anywhere.