Happy Nice Mall

When hotel or motel guests check into their rooms, they expect at least to be greeted with a clean area, a bed, and soap in the bathroom.

But what happens if you leave that soap behind?

They’re often thrown out, said founder Shawn Siepler. clean the worldis a nonprofit founded in 2009 that recycles soap for those in need, with more than 8,000 hospitality partners, including Marriott International and Walt Disney Resorts. The nonprofit has distributed nearly 70 million bars of soap by collecting, melting, reshaping and packaging partially used soap left behind by hotel guests. soap is in more than 120 countries, including Romania, where many Ukrainian refugees come from.

Clean the World currently focuses on repurposing bar soap at seven warehouses around the world. Companies sign up Get boxes to collect discarded items online and at their properties in the program. Full boxes are sent to the nonprofit’s warehouses.

The organization now has around 60 employees, but its beginnings were much more modest; Siepler and a small group of family and acquaintances hand scraping used soap with potato peelers in a garage in Orlando.

“When the police first came to the garage, they wanted to see what we Puerto Ricans were cooking. So I gave them a tour,” Mr. Siepler said during a video interview.

Speech edited for length and clarity.

Before starting Clean the World, you traveled a lot as a sales executive. How has your work led you to the nonprofit?

I was traveling – Monday New York, Tuesday Chicago, Wednesday, Los Angeles, Thursday and back to St. Louis—and the two clients I personally managed were Target and Best Buy, both headquartered in Minneapolis. I was in a hotel room in Minneapolis when I came up with the Clean Up The World concept.

I needed to increase my alcohol consumption to stay warm in Minneapolis. “What’s going on with the soap?” It was one of those nights I said. and called the front desk to ask. And they said it was thrown – actually they told me to have another cocktail.

I was doing very well, but as an entrepreneur I had a desire to think about sustainability and green technology and want to do something on my own. That’s “What’s going on with soap?” It made me ask. I was looking for products that could be recycled.

The company started in your cousin’s one-car garage – tell me what those early days were like.

I am a born and bred South Florida native and we were collecting soap from hotels around the Orlando airport in my cousin’s garage. We’d all sit in upturned pickle buckets with potato peelers and scrape the outside of the soap bars to clean the surface.

My other cousin was in the meat grinder and would grind it. And then we had these Kenmore stoves and you cooked the soap. All the impurities bubble up and you wipe them off and it turns into paste.

Then we made large wooden soap bars and the paste would dry the next day. We would cut the sticks, take them out and put them on the shelves.

We needed to make music in salsa and merengue. Of course, we couldn’t get full power when the meat grinder was on, so every 30 minutes the power was cut off.

How did Clean the World become the operation it is today?

We entered the garage in February 2009.

In Orlando we were just distributing to local charities and in July 2009 we had the opportunity to go to Haiti. We buy 2,000 bars of soap and enter a church with 10,000 people. I remember saying “we’ll be back”. We’ll bring more soap. I promise.”

When we made that trip, our local Fox partner went with us and documented our work. It just so happened that when it aired in New York, Katie Couric was working for CBS Evening News, and a senior producer called us in late August or September of 2009 and said, “We want to do a piece about you.”

That’s what forced us out of the garage and into a friend’s warehouse. It gave us a little corner point where we set up our operations.

We’ve been there since September 2009, and we’ve started getting a lot of hotels outside of Orlando contacting us, so we started setting up a shipping process for hotel boxes to ship to us. About three months later, the Haiti earthquake struck. We were just starting to move into our first facility, a 3,000 square foot facility in Orlando, and the Haiti earthquake helped steer us towards more advanced machinery because demand for our program really increased.

Talk about the process of cleaning and reusing soap.

We have the same type of machines that a soap maker uses. When we get the soap, the first thing we do is run it through what’s called a scratcher, and at the end there’s a very fine filter that pushes all the soap out. And as the soap comes out, the filter captures the hair, paper and all surface material.

While this heat and motion disinfects the soap, the guys and girls we call the soap whisperers in our facility have to feel the batch itself to know if it has the right moisture level so it doesn’t fall apart when it goes into production. or not too wet.

We regularly send our soap to a third-party lab that does tests on it to make sure everything is clean.

What should travelers pay attention to when using soap in hotel rooms?

If you are staying at a hotel that does not use our program, take the soap with you, keep it away from the landfill, use it at home. Unpackaged soap can be donated to a local homeless shelter or a local charity you support. For this, we prefer to get a better life.