Every day in North America, thousands of hotels discard millions of pounds of soap and shampoo. These products often end up in already overflowing landfills and contaminate fragile groundwater systems.
Impoverished people around the world die every day from acute respiratory infection and diarrheal disease because they have no soap. The death toll is staggering. Each year more than five million lives are lost to these diseases with the majority of deaths being among children less than five years old. Studies have shown that simple hand washing substantially reduces the spread of these diseases. Unfortunately, the essential items for proper hand washing are unobtainable for millions of people worldwide.
In an effort to prevent these needless deaths from occurring, Clean the World distributes recycled soap products, along with appropriate educational materials, to impoverished countries worldwide, and to domestic homeless shelters.
In just 19 months, Clean the World has partnered with more than 400 hotel properties in 45 states and Canada to collect, sanitize, recycle and distribute 375 tons (750,000 lbs.) of soap. Hotel partners represent major brands, such as Walt Disney World Resorts, Harrah’s Entertainment, Mandarin Oriental, Westgate Resorts and Four Seasons.
The soaps, primarily in the form of 6 million 2 oz.-bars, are disinfected and re-formed during a sanitization and rebatching process at recycling operation centers in Orlando and Vancouver. Shampoo and conditioner bottles are also sanitized for distribution. New recycling operation centers are scheduled to open soon in Las Vegas and Toronto as the organization continues its rapid expansion.
“Each day around the globe, more than 9 thousand children under age 5 die from acute respiratory illness and diarrheal disease – the top two killers of children worldwide,” says Shawn Seipler, executive director of Clean the World. “Both are preventable, in large part, by washing with bar soap. That gives an added sense of urgency to our mission.”
Distribution is achieved through a network of global distribution partnerships, including Floating Doctors, Cap Haitien Health Network operating in Haiti, and World Vision, a Christian humanitarian organization, which also has helped deliver hundreds of pallets of soap to homeless shelters, women’s shelters and missions in the United States.
Soaps have been delivered to more than 30 countries worldwide, such as Haiti, Pakistan, Armenia, Dominican Republic, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Uganda, Lesotho, and Swaziland.
The effort has a strong environmental impact as well, which makes it especially attractive to so-called “green” hotels and eco-friendly industries.
“Each day in North America, nearly 2 million bars of soap and even more tiny, plastic hair care bottles are discarded as trash,” Seipler says. “Nearly 358 tons of soap and plastic bottles are sent to local landfills on a daily basis. We can help divert that trash and recycle these amenities into life-saving, germ-fighting items of good health and great hope.”
