Mission: Save Lives With Soap

Hotel soap isn’t a throwaway anymore. Neither is shampoo or hand lotion. For years they were tossed in the landfill, no questions asked. But there’s a growing movement to not only recycle hotel soap and shampoo, but to repackage it and ship it to impoverished regions around the world.

The charge is being led by Florida-based humanitarian startup Clean the World, founded in 2009 by entrepreneur Shawn Seipler. Established in hotels, casino hotels, bed and breakfasts, and timeshares, the program aims to curb the amount of waste coming out of one of the largest producers of waste, the hospitality industry.

While the top recycling hotels are based in large markets like Orlando, Florida, and Las Vegas, the movement has trickled into smaller markets like Northwest Arkansas. Three hotels — the DoubleTree Club by Hilton in Springdale, and the Holiday Inn and Suites and the Staybridge Suites in Rogers — are enrolled in the program and are doing their part for health and sanitation in places like sub-Saharan Africa and southeast Asia.

Owned by Springdale-based Krushiker Hospitality Group Inc., the three Northwest Arkansas hotels are among 12 in the state that are enrolled. While Clean the World started out as a big-city program, it welcomes the push into smaller places like Springdale and Rogers.

“In 2009, we launched Clean the World by collecting discarded soap in Orlando and Las Vegas due to the density of hotels in those large markets,” Seipler said. “As we branched out across the country, we noticed that hotel managers and housekeepers in smaller markets were eager to get on board. People in small-town America are compassionate, generous, and always willing to help a neighbor.”

Since its founding, Clean the World says it has distributed over 25 million soap bars in 99 countries. About 4,000 hotels representing about 500,000 hotel rooms partner with Clean the World. The campaign’s prime targets are diarrheal diseases which kill up to 1.5 million children each year, according to research cited by Clean the World. The risk of contracting a diarrheal disease can be reduced by as much as 47 percent through handwashing, according to research cited by Clean the World.

Two of the bigger natural disasters the company has been associated with are the April earthquake in Nepal, and the Stop Ebola campaign in Sierra Leone.

Seipler came up with the idea to recycle soap while working as a vice president of sales and marketing for an e-commerce company. All those nights out on the road in hotel rooms added up to one big question: What happens to all the soap? When he found out it was being thrown away, his life changed.

Since there are about 53,000 hotels in the United States with 15 rooms or more, and about 600 lodging establishments in Arkansas, there’s plenty of room for growth.

“Our goal is to get every hotel to join the mission,” said Clean the World spokesman Kristin Rucker. “In the future, we’re looking to go global.”

Small Effort, Big Impact

Recycling is nothing new at the DoubleTree in Springdale. General manager Krista Dalton said the hotel has been recycling cardboard and paper products for years, with employees even delivering material to depots in their personal vehicles.

Office paperwork is printed on both sides of the page before it’s sent to the recycling queue; used linens are donated to shelters; broken TVs are dropped off at Boston Mountain Solid Waste District; 480 used water bottles are collected each week; and Earth Hour, when all nonessential lights are turned off, is observed each March.

“If we can recycle it, we’ll recycle it, one way or the other,” Dalton said.

In 2014, the hotel joined the Global Soap Project, which has since merged with Clean the World. Dalton said she received an email from Hilton corporate notifying her about the program, and that Hilton in general has shown an interest in reducing waste across its portfolio of hotels.

“They challenged the brand to really think about recycling,” Dalton said. “We really stopped and said, ‘What can we recycle?’”

The soap program is simple. Reclaimed soap and liquids are collected, put into a plastic bin and shipped to Clean the World using UPS. Once the material is at Clean the World, it’s processed and sent out by request to specific locations, where it’s then put into care packages.

While the program is not mandatory for DoubleTree, Dalton said it’s the right thing to do. The key, she says, is letting staff know that recycling is a priority.

“It’s a learning process,” she said. “It’s a teaching process.”

What’s happening with Clean the World is part of a larger effort to make hotels more efficient. The American Hotel and Lodging Association, an industry advocate for the $155 billion domestic market, estimates that a 300-room hotel can create as much as three tons of waste in a day. However, 60 percent of that waste can be recycled.

The AHLA, the oldest of its kind in the United States, supports a recycling program that addresses utilities, towels and linens, lighting, toilets, showerheads and appliances.

In Rogers, Staybridge Suites participates in Clean the World, and to date has recycled 82 pounds of soap and 63 pounds of bottled amenities.

The Holiday Inn and Suites in Rogers also participates in the program. General manager Patrick Jennings said the hotel has already turned in 60 pounds of soap and 111 pounds of bottled amenities.

For Jennings, there was never a doubt his hotel would enroll in Clean the World.

“When we discovered the program, we immediately knew that we wanted to participate,” Jennings said. “We discussed the program with the housekeeping staff and they were eager to participate. In addition, we were stunned at the amount of soap and shampoo that was collected in such a short time period. The obvious answer is that it is awesome to know that such a small effort on our part can make a serious impact elsewhere.”