How is napisan environmentally friendly? Isn't it just a bunch of chemicals? Please educate me?
KB
For starters, everything you eat/drink/what you are made up of is chemicals. So not all are bad and they can re-combine quickly in the right conditions to make something that will kill you, or does nothing.
Drinking petrol will kill you, but burn it and you get CO2 (and a bit of CO) and Water, which are important components of beer.
From wikipedia:
As an oxidizing agent, sodium percarbonate is an ingredient in a number of home and laundry cleaning products, including non-chlorine bleach products such as OxiClean, Tide laundry detergent,[1] and Vanish.[6] Dissolved in water, it yields a mixture of hydrogen peroxide (which eventually decomposes to water and oxygen) and sodium carbonate ("soda ash").[1]
2Na2CO3.3H2O2 ? 2Na2CO3 + 3H2O2 [6]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium_percarbonate
So as it breaks down in the tank, the excess oxygen combines with the nasties and gets rid of the smells and the sodium carbonate makes the solution more alkaline which also kills the bacteria.
I used whatever nappy soaker I could get with the highest sodium percarbonate content and never had any issues (but I also claim that my crap doesn't stink anyway). I had our used portaloo bouncing around in the back of the ute in warm weather for 3 days (and I seriously abused it on day 1) and there was no offensive odour when I emptied it. The brown slurry wasn't particularly appealing and I didn't get too close, but it was nowhere near as horrendous as I thought it was going to be.