Shawn Seipler is the Founder of Clean the World, Dedicated to Recycling Used Hotel Soap for Those in Need

Clean the World is a non-for-profit organization based in Orlando, Florida

The company cleaning up the world’s biggest hotels

Around the world, five million hotel soaps make their way to landfills every single day. But Clean the World aims to turn those discarded slabs into a life-changing commodity.

With recycling centers in the United States and Hong Kong, the not-for-profit corporation has partnered with 5,000 hotels internationally to recycle soap from nearly one million hotel rooms daily, distributing them instead to families, schools, and organizations in need.

Why? UNICEF estimates that 1.4 million children a year die from diseases such as pneumonia and cholera, easily preventable with better hygiene.

“Soap and health and hygiene have a huge impact in our world,” founder Shawn Seipler said. “Soap impacts health. Soap impacts one’s environment. Soap impacts economic issues. Soap impacts the rate at which infectious disease spreads.”

As the vice president of a global technology company, he traveled constantly, staying no more than a few nights at a time at any given hotel. Again and again, he noticed that his hotel soap disappeared overnight, even if he’d hardly touched it.

“One day, I called the front desk at the hotel I was staying at and asked them what happened to the soap when I was done with it. They said it was discarded,” recalled Seipler.

He did some research and discovered that the hotel industry was tossing a million bars of soap every day. Seipler didn’t immediately know how or what he would do with this information, but further investigation led him to an important connection.

At the time, he found that nine million children died every year from pneumonia and gastrointestinal diseases. “Countless studies showed that if we gave these children soap and talked to them about how and when to wash their hands, we could cut those deaths in half,” says Seipler.

“With the amount of soap, we were throwing away globally, I was surprised that nobody had put this together before us.”

Seipler learned how to recycle soap, but the operation was scrappy at first. “I’m half German and half Puerto Rican, so I called my German family members and said, ‘I’ve got this great idea. We’re going to start collecting soap from hotels and we’re going to recycle it and send it all over the world,'” he said.

They replied: “Don’t quit your day job, Shawn.”

“Well, I decided to call my Puerto Rican family members and I said: ‘Listen, I’ve got a really good idea. Why don’t we start cooking soap so we can save children’s lives around the world?’ They said they were in, so we started calling hotels around Orlando, Florida, and asked them to give us their soap,” said Seipler.

The center of operations was his cousin’s garage — that’s where they stored the used bars of soap, which they then scraped with a potato peeler and ground up in a meat grinder. The next step was to boil them in slow cookers until they had a dough that would fill the molds of the new bar of soap.

“It would take us 24 hours to make 500 bars of soap,” the entrepreneur recalled.

Thirteen years later, Clean the World has donated nearly 70 million recycled bars of soap and is present in 127 countries, notably the Philippines, Zambia, the United States, Haiti, and Honduras. Seipler’s mission remains the same — to save children’s lives through improved hygiene — although, in recent years, it has expanded its service program to reach out to other vulnerable communities, from those affected by natural disasters or conflict to the homeless.

“COVID-19 changed how the world views hygiene. Clean the World’s mission is more important than ever, and our hotel partners are showing us how valuable it is by continuing to add new hotels to our hospitality recycling program and increasing the amount of soap they collect and send in to be recycled,” he said.

In addition to distributing recycled soaps and offering other services such as mobile showers and educational workshops on personal hygiene, Clean the World, which is part of the United Nations World WASH Group, is on the front line when it comes to helping during humanitarian disasters. Over the past few years, the NGO has distributed soap to Syrian and Somali refugees and cared for dozens of Latin American immigrants stranded at the U.S.-Mexico border. They are currently working on a project to distribute 200,000 hygiene kits — soap, toothbrushes, and toothpaste — in Ukraine and the border countries of Poland and Romania, where hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian refugees are fleeing their country because of the Russian invasion.

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“We plan to open operations in Australia, China, and the Middle East in the coming years,” he explained. “We are also working on social micro-enterprising programming across Africa and Latin America, so that we can create Clean the World program operators in areas where the need is in the immediate region, so used soap will be collected, re-manufactured and distributed all within a very close proximity.”

As for the public, the organization is planning a “cool way” for a hotel guest to “Track their bar of Soap” after use, as well as exploring additional products that we can create out of recycled plastic.

Seipler never forgets the mission that led him to create Clean the World — to contribute to the task of reducing the mortality rate of children under 5 years of age due to diseases related to lack of hygiene. According to figures provided by the NGO, from 2009 to 2020 the rate decreased by 65%.

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