As a global sales executive it wasn’t uncommon for Shawn Seipler to be in New York on Monday, Chicago on Tuesday, St. Louis on Wednesday and L.A. on Thursday. That, of course, added up to a lot of hotel stays, which got him to thinking, “What happens to leftover soap in hotel rooms after I leave?”

Seipler called the front desk where he was staying. “They told me it gets thrown away,” he says. “That answer bothered me, so I started calling other hotels. I called hundreds. The answer was always the same: We throw it away.”

He looked at the numbers: According to the American Hotel & Lodging Association, there are 5.7 million hotel rooms in the U.S. At average occupancy, he estimated that millions of bars of soap were being discarded every single day.

“Around that same time, I learned that children were dying every day from pneumonia and diarrheal disease, illnesses we know can be significantly reduced by something as basic as handwashing with soap,” he recalls. “On one side, hotels were discarding millions of bars of soap every day. On the other, kids were dying because they didn’t have any. The math just didn’t make sense to me.”

With these startling statistics in mind, Seipler quit his job and launched Clean the World, a nonprofit organization based in Orlando, which collects and recycles soap bars and plastic amenities — such as hotel bottles, pumps, caps and labels that rarely get a shot at recycling — that would otherwise be discarded by the hospitality industry.

How it began

With help from his family members, he transformed a one-car garage into his workshop. Together they’d gather around with potato peelers and shave the donated soap to clean it. Fast forward 17 years later, and now 8,600 hotels throughout North America, Europe and Asia donate their used soap and plastic amenities to Clean the World. And there are recycling centers in Orlando, Las Vegas, Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, the Netherlands and Hong Kong.

Through Clean the World’s Global Hospitality Recycling Program, those used soaps are carefully refined into noodle-like forms to remove all impurities, sterilized and reshaped into new bars that are donated to NGOS around the world, such as The WASH Foundation.

“The WASH Foundation continues to be the humanitarian arm of everything we do, delivering hygiene education and resources to vulnerable communities around the world,” Seipler says. “The vision has always been bigger than soap. We want to build a circular model where nothing in the hospitality industry goes to waste, and no one goes without basic hygiene.”

Giving soap a second life

According to Seipler, the vast majority of hotels are still throwing away perfectly usable soap and plastic every day, and most of it winds up in landfills. “Every bar of soap sitting in a landfill could have been in someone’s hands,” he says. “The gap between what’s being wasted and what’s still needed is massive, and we’ve barely scratched the surface.”

At Clean the World’s Orlando headquarters, volunteers sort the soap bars and plastic bottle amenities and pack the recycled soap into boxes that get shipped to NGOs around the world. Thanks to his team’s efforts, more than 31 million pounds of waste has been kept out of landfills. Better yet, more than 18 million pounds of soap have been recycled and sent to homes in 127 countries.

“There is a space between what the world throws away and what people still need,” Seipler says. “Most of us walk past that space every day without noticing it. I happened to notice it in a hotel bathroom. But it exists everywhere, in every industry, in every community. And anyone can step into that space and make a difference. You don’t need a background in public health. You don’t need millions of dollars. You need to be willing to ask a question, and then follow it wherever it takes you.”

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