Ever wondered where your hotel soap went after you use it? Orlando-based company, Clean the World, has started collecting used hotel soap, melting it down and making new soap to send to impoverished countries. The company is saving landfill space locally and is potentially saving lives globally.
Shawn Seipler learned about the process of rebatching after finding out that the hotel he was staying at threw away the left over soap. Rebatching is a process that converts old soap into fresh soap by melting it down, reforming it and turning it back out. Once Seipler learned soap could be recycled, he found that world wide thousands of children die every day from pneumonia and diarrhea, something that could be preventable with proper hygiene.
Hotels that partner with Clean the World pay the company 50 center per room a month to have soaps recycled. Clean the World provides bins, pickup, delivery, shipping and training to the housekeeping staff. Staff separates puts the soap in a bin and then CTW trucks it to one of the company's processing plant.
Last year, CTW made more than 7 million bars of soap, including 500,000 bars for Haiti and the Bahamas after Hurricane Matthew.
Currently U.S. 5,000 hotels participate in the program, including all Disney properties and a majority of the Vegas strip. Hotels in Hong Kong and London have also participated.
Hotels aren't the only companies that are getting on board. Recently, United Airlines agreed to donate unused items out of its first-class passenger kits to use in hygiene kits.
Since the company started recycling soap, the death in children has declined. Upwards of 16,000 children under the age of 5 die every day still, however, prompting Seipler to say that there's still more work to do.
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