Sometimes a stroke of genius occurs when you look at something you've seen dozens of time before. Shawn Seipler, a frequent business traveler, looked at the slightly used bar of soap in his hotel bathroom and wondered where it went after he left. He found out that the used bars of soap get thrown away each day and realized that they could still be useful.
Seipler founded a nonprofit initiative called Clean the World with the purpose of recycling those millions of bars of soap and put them to good use. Instead of landing on a garbage heap, the soap is being processed and sent to developing countries where there are illnesses that can be prevented by the simple act of hand washing with soap.
Soap is such an everyday thing in developed countries that few realize what a luxury it is in developing countries. But the simple act of washing your hands is one of the cornerstones of public health.
Clean the World collects the soap from more than 4,000 hotels around the world, along with partially used bottles of shampoo. The organization shreds the soap and cleans it and then reforms it into bars and packages them. The reformed bars of soap are then sent to countries around the world. They are also used in homeless shelters in the United States.
If you think that the itty bitty bars of soap a hotel provides would not add up to much, think twice. Clean the World had given 25 million bars of soap to local nongovernmental agencies. These groups then distribute the soap to local communities and teach people the importance of keeping clean.
Clean the World had joined forces with a group with similar goals called Global Soap to increase production and distribution of the recycled soap.
