One of the best things about staying in a hotel room is discovering all of the tiny beauty products they leave for you in the bathroom. The brands and amount may vary depending on the kind of hotel you’re staying at, but one thing seems pretty consistent: they all usually provide shampoo, conditioner, and bar soap. You usually can’t finish them, though, and you might take home the little hair product bottles for future use. But the bar soap? If you’ve already opened and used some of it, you’re probably going to leave it behind. And if you’ve ever wondered what happens to that used hotel soap, we now have answers.
It’s good news: your used hotel soap usually isn’t go to waste – if the place is doing something right.
At certain hotels, your old soap could be reused, and not in a bad way. According to Thrillist, there’s an Orlando-based company called Clean the World that collects used hotel soap, melts it down, and uses it to make new soap to send to impoverished companies. Hotels actually pay Clean the World to take that old soap (it’s about 50 cents per room, per month).
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Clean the World was founded by Shawn Seipler, who wondered what hotels did with old bars of soap. He did some research and found out they just get thrown out. He also discovered that soap can be recycled and rebatched. Considering thousands of families all over the world can’t afford soap (and soap is important to stay clean, healthy, and illness-free, says the World Health Organization), Seipler decided there was no reason every hotel’s soap had to go to waste when it could help out so many people in need.
CTW makes things easy for hotels: they provide bins for the housekeeping staff, arrange pickups, delivery, shipping, and training, and takes the bins to processing plants. It’s there that the soaps get melted down and sent to NGOs and charities like the Red Cross and Salvation Army.
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Soap isn’t the only product they repurpose for the greater good. CTW also works to recycle partially used shampoo, conditioner, and body wash bottles. If the bottles are over three-quarters full, they are examined, cleaned, and included with other hygiene items to be given to homeless shelters around the world.
Their efforts are working: last year, CTW sent out 400,000 hygiene kits and made more than 7 million bars of soap. Over the last seven years, they have tracked with a worldwide decline in the number of child deaths, but they recognize the problem is far from being solved.
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Right now, about 5,000 hotels participate in the program in the U.S. (this includes all of Disney’s properties and most hotels on the Vegas strip). It’s worldwide, with hotels in Hong Kong and London participating. United Airlines also agreed to donate items from their first-class passenger kits, including sleep masks and ear plugs.
It’s pretty awesome to think that your partially used soap you were ready to throw out could be used for something so important!