Since we have the choice - do not use soap to wash dishes. Use detergent - it's NOT the same. Soap MUST be rinsed off; any residue causes severe GI distress. Detergent in the modest amounts used to wash dishes is pretty benign - I've just wiped it off on occasion when water was scarce. In fact, a close perusal of ingredients for most toothpastes...

Used to be that scouring pads had soap in them. I'd check your package just to be sure.

I rarely carry detergent when afoot. It simply isn't needed. Cutting grease is about the most useful thing that a surficant like soap or detergent does - simple scrubbing and wiping handles everything else well enough. To that end, I usually have a small scrap of green scrubby in the kit - it has other mild abrasive uses as well. On a recent backpacking trip we tried out those detergent-impregnated scrubbies that most of the dish detergent brands seem to have out (Dawn & Palmolive come to mind). They worked very well. Just like traditional scouring pads, we found that they release a LOT of detergent when first used - actually too much for the amount of washing needed - and after a few uses got down to a more reasonable amount of residual detergent.

You could do the same for yourself by cutting a scrap of green scrubbie and dripping 2 - 3 drops of dish detergent into it. Let it dry (may take several days or a trip thru the food dryer) and you're set. If you''re really into it, you can pick up a bottle of that snazzy stuff sold in backpacking stores - wash dishes, bodies, hair, and teeth all with the same stuff. I have used that and it seems to work fine.

As for the steel wool suggestion - eeew! Steel wool is oiled to keep it from rusting. When it's used to scrub pots and pans, lots of steel fibers break off and can be a real pitn to get out of the pan (the finer the steel wool the worse the problem). After you wash something with it, it's chock full of food residue that's imposible to get out and it turns into a lump of fibrous rust almost overnight. That's been my experience, anyway (I had to resort to steel wool a few times - I'll lug home dirty stuff rather than do that again).

HTH

Tom