Have you ever wondered what would the management do with the half used hotel room soaps?
Every day millions of bars of soap and half-used bottles of shampoo are discarded in hotel shower trays around the world; abandoned by guests who didn’t stay long enough to use them up. Unless you plan on holding up in a hotel room for an extended period of time, it’s safe to say that complimentary bar of soap won’t get used up.
Managing waste in hotels is a very difficult thing to do. The high turnover and mindset of guests almost guarantee that lots of energy, products, and water will be spent to accommodate travelers. Maybe you’ve noticed that hotels almost always seem to have full rolls of toilet paper and brand new wrapped soap for guests when they check in.
Many of these toiletries are scooped up by chambermaids, thrown into bin bags and sent off to landfill sites, which is a disaster for the environment and a social travesty has given that many people around the world are going without proper sanitation.
Every day in the US, a million small bars of soap are thrown away as waste. But one man, realizing how terrible and non-sustainable this practice was, put forth a plan to put all those wasted bars to good use. Now, Clean the World collects and repurposes trashed bars of soap so that people in need can have access to hygienic cleaning supplies.
Clean The World:
Hotels actually pay Clean the World to take their unused soap, $.50 per room, per month, according to the reports. They also partner with cosmetic companies like Unilever to receive their rejected soap bars. Once the old soap arrives in one of Clean the World’s warehouses (which you can find in India, Las Vegas, Hong Kong, Orlando, and Montreal), the soap is melted down and reformed into new bars.
From there it’s shipped out to poorer countries where hygienic products are in scarce supply or unaffordable. Clean the World CEO Shawn Seipler traveled a lot in his previous career, one day realizes just how much waste is created by hotels. When he learned that it was all just thrown away, he felt compelled to find a better way of doing things. His company does something called “re-batching.”
He learned that many in impoverished areas all over the world face health issues and even early death due to a lack of access to cleaning supplies. It didn’t take Shawn long to dream up a better way of utilizing this waste.
Shawn said in an interview, “Then it was just a matter of figuring out how to get the soap to recycle, and getting into their hands. It was an aha moment, and I realized this was my calling. I called my Puerto Rican relatives and they said ‘let’s do it.’ Pretty soon we were sitting in my garage on pickle buckets with vegetable peelers, cooking soap.”
In 2016, they made more than 7 million soaps and 400,000 hygiene kits. Of these bars of soap, 500,000 went to help those affected by Hurricane Matthew in Haiti and the Bahamas. The company also works with half-used shampoo, body wash, and conditioner bottles.
These items are closely inspected, emptier bottles are recycled, and then they are included in the aforementioned hygiene kits which also include toothbrushes, toothpaste, and hand sanitizer before being distributed to homeless shelters all over the globe.
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