Recycled suds saves lives
By: Cherie Ross, Mifflinburg Main Street Manager
The days are long gone when hotel guests slipped towels and robes into their suitcases when checking out, but what about all those fancy toiletries in the bathroom. Many of us take them home and use them in our guest bathrooms. (At our house, they just kept accumulating so I would bag them up and give them to a local domestic violence shelter). On the other hand, the majority get left behind mostly slightly used. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, the American hospitality industry is an enormous waster creating 200 million metric tons of solid waste per year. That’s a huge amount of waste going to landfills.
There’s a new trend, though, according to an article in a recent Washington Post, especially in the bathroom toiletries department. You are more likely these days to see liquid dispensers in the showers, smaller soaps and smaller or less filled bottles of toiletries. That’s a start. In small ways over many years, the toiletries have been put to better use than in a landfill. A quarter century go, properties would allow their housekeeping staff to take the items home to use or share with their neighbors. At the beginning of this century, a Texas group started distributing hotel hygiene products to Mexican communities. Other local groups have also on a more grass roots basis collected and distributed toiletries to local homeless shelters and hospitals.
In 2008, a Florida business traveler named Shawn Seipler wondered what happened to these items while staying at a hotel in Minneapolis. He asked the front desk about what happened to these items after people checked out of their rooms and he heard the same answer he heard 30 more times from hotels across the country: they end up in the trash. Seipler and his friend, Paul Till, then founded Clean the World. The organization opened in Orlando in 2009 with the twin goals of protecting the environment and improving sanitization in developing nations to help combat the biggest health threats to children worldwide which are acute lower respiratory infection and diarrheal diseases.
Clean the World has since partnered with more than 1300 lodgings in the United States and Puerto Rico and has handed out more than 20 million bars of soap in 45 countries. According to the founders, they realized that more than one million soaps were being tossed out daily and 9000 children per day were dying from respiratory or diarrheal diseases that could be largely prevented with the availability of soap. There are more than 4.8 million guest rooms in the United States alone with a smorgasbord of toiletries in each of those rooms that could provide better sanitation to the world’s children.
Here’s how it works in a nutshell. Housekeeping staff collect the items in bags which are then picked up and taken to the headquarters. The soaps are scraped down (just like peeling a carrot). Much of that work is done by volunteers who, individually or as groups, sign up for days as guest scrapers. The soaps are sanitized and turned into scented pellets after which they are compacted into slabs. The slabs are then cut up and packed into boxes for shipping.
Since one particular hotel signed up as a partner with Clean the World, the 1641 room hotel has contributed more than 54,000 bars of soap which is enough to provide almost 11,000 children with a month’s supply, and 8,925 pounds of bottled toiletries, enough for 6,347 children for an entire month. Just imagine what all 4.8 million rooms nationwide could do!
Other groups are joining in. A Ugandan refugee and his wife founded the Global Soap Project based in Georgia and recently shipped 10,000 bars of soap to the new country of South Sudan and has created a partnership with Hilton Worldwide. In 2010 Hand in Hand was created in the tri-state area of Oklahoma, Missouri and Kansas and delivers kits stocked with recycled products to local Catholic missions, women’s and homeless shelters, and post-tornado JopIin, MO.
If you are interested in learning more about the Clean the World project, go to www.cleantheworld.org.
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Business After Hours
Sponsored By: Contrast Communications, Mifflinburg, PA
MAKING CONNECTIONS: Diane and Ted Hartley chat with Alan Quimby (right) during the Chamber's Jan. 19 Business After Hours event at Contrast Communications in Mifflinburg.
PROFESSIONAL NETWORKING: John Uehling (right), president of Contrast Communications and host of the Chamber's Business After Hours reception, talks to Chamber member Scott Peterson, of the Eye Center.