Did you know that for the last ten years used soap bars at Walt Disney World hotels haven't
been thrown in the trash?
Instead, they’re being recycled to make, well, more soap.
In 2010 The Walt Disney Company partnered with Clean the World, an organization that
collects and recycles used but unfinished soap from hotels before putting them into
hygiene kits and sending them to impoverished people all around the globe.
Clean the World was founded in 2009 by Shawn Seipler.
Seipler, at the time, was a VP of sales at an e-commerce company based in Florida.
Being in sales, he spent around 150 nights out of the year on the road and, as a result,
in hotel rooms.
He wondered during one of those trips what happened to all of the soap that would get
used for a couple of nights and then left just behind.
As expected, he learned that it was all thrown in the garbage.
Meanwhile, the World Health Organization had reported that of the estimated 3,600 children
who die every day around the world, up to 65% of those deaths could have been prevented
through regular hand washing and hygiene as a way to ward off diarrhoeal diseases and
acute respiratory infections.
From the two realizations, the idea for Clean the World was born.
Recycling soap would be a way to cut down on waste caused by throwing those hotel amenities
away every single day, and at the same time provide free soap for people around the world
who could use it to help stay clean and healthy.
So how does one recycle soap?
Well, the collected soap bars are brought to a processing center where they’re first
surface cleaned by hand before being sterilized in a bleach solution.
The bars are then put into a steamer that permeates the soap in order to kill any E. Coli, salmonella,
or staph.
That sterilized soap is then ground down and then repressed into entirely new bars,
which are packaged up and boxed for distribution.
Clean the World’s Orlando processing center, which claims to be the first high volume soap
recycling plant in the world, can process between eight and ten thousand bars of soap a day.
From there Clean the World packages the soap into different kits, including standard kits,
kits for children, kits for women, and kits for veterans.
The soap is joined with other amenities, depending on the kit type, such as bandages, shampoos,
pads, shaving cream and so on.
How much soap does a decade’s world of donations from Disney amount to?
In total since joining the program, The Walt Disney Company has donated 557,000 pounds
of soap from Disney World, Disneyland, a few of their other resorts, and Hong Kong Disneyland.
From those donations Clean the World has been able to produce 2,971,680 bars of recycled soap.
Let’s take a look at how that breaks down.
Disneyland donated enough for 457,000 of those bars of soap with the Grand Californian taking
the lead, followed by the Disneyland Hotel, and then finally the Paradise Pier hotel.
Disney’s Vero Beach, Hilton Head Island, and Aulani resorts donated enough to create
nearly 71,000 bars of soap.
137,000 bars of soap were created with the donations from Hong Kong’s Hollywood Hotel
and Disneyland Hotel.
Then there’s Walt Disney World.
It’s no surprise that with over twenty resorts it resulted in the lion’s share of recycled
soap.
All in all the resort’s donation allowed for the production of over 2.2 million bars of soap.
The Port Orleans resorts are grouped together and account for 465 thousand bars, followed
by the three All-Star resorts who are just shy of 277 thousand bars.
After that, the first solo resort goes to the Contemporary, which donated enough for
200 thousand bars of soap.
As for all the other resorts, it’s kind of all over the place, with Coronado following
up at 198 thousand and Fort Wilderness at the other end with just shy of 18 thousand.
While Disney is, no doubt, one of the largest partners working with Clean the World, they’re
joined by plenty of other hotel chains, including Hilton, Marriott, InterContinental, the Hard
Rock, and Holiday Inn.
In total, the organization collects used soap from up to 1.1 million hotel rooms a day.
The hotels all pay a fee of 50 cents per room per month to cover the collection, transportation,
and processing costs.
For Walt Disney World’s nearly 28,000 hotel rooms, that means a potential monthly bill
of almost $14,000.
As of this year, Clean the World has distributed over 53 million bars of soap to families in
over 120 countries around the world, which include many homeless shelters here in the
United States.
All of that donated soap amounts to over 20 million pounds of prevented waste.
And that’s just one the multiple ways hotels across the country and around the world are
starting to think about their impact.
Some smaller hotels offer little bags now so that guests can bring the soap home with them.
When it comes to shampoo and conditioner other resorts, including Disney, are transitioning
over to larger wall mounted dispensers rather than small disposable bottles.
It shows that in the continuing quest to improve the environmental footprint we leave behind,
no detail is too small, even if it is just a tiny bar of soap.