Scrubbing up, one recycled bar of soap at a time

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

But what happens when you leave that soap behind?

It typically ends up in the trash, said Shawn Seipler, the founder of Clean the World, a nonprofit founded in 2009 that recycles bar soap from over 8,000 hospitality partners, including Marriott International and Walt Disney Resorts, for those in need. By collecting, melting, reforming and packaging partially used soap left behind by hotel guests, the nonprofit has distributed nearly 70 million bars of soap in more than 120 countries, including Romania, where many Ukrainian refugees have arrived.

Clean the World currently focuses on repurposing bar soap in seven warehouses worldwide. Companies can enroll in the program online and receive boxes to collect discarded products at their properties. Full boxes are shipped to the nonprofit's warehouses.

The organization now has approximately 60 employees, but its beginning was far more humble, with Seipler and a small group of family and acquaintances scraping used soap by hand with potato peelers in a garage in Orlando.

"The first time that the police came by the garage, they wanted to see what all of us Puerto Ricans were cooking. So I gave them a tour," Seipler said during a video interview.

Before starting Clean the World, Seipler traveled a lot as a sales executive.

He called the front desk to ask, and they said it was thrown away — "they actually told me to have another cocktail."

Seipler said he was thinking about sustainability and green technology as an entrepreneur. "And that led to me ask, 'What happens to the soap?'"

In the nonprofit's early days, he and his family were collecting soap from hotels around the Orlando airport area in his cousin's garage. "We'd all sit around on upside-down pickle buckets with potato peelers, and we would scrape the outside of the bars of soap to surface clean it."

Another cousin used a meat grinder to grind it down, and used a Kenmore cooker to cook the soap. The impurities bubble up, the team would wipe those off, and the results would turn into paste. They put the paste in wood soap molds, and the paste would dry the next day. Then they'd wire-cut the bars and put them on racks.

"We had to have music on — salsa and merengue. Of course, we couldn't get the power right when the meat grinder was on, so the power would cut out every 30 minutes," Seipler said.

"We take 2,000 bars of soap and go into a church that has 10,000 people in it. I remember just saying, 'We're gonna come back. We're gonna bring more soap. I promise,'" Seipler said.

After their story was picked up by CBS, they moved to a larger facility and set up a shipping process to get hotel bins shipped to them.

They use the same type of machinery that a soap manufacturer uses, and regularly send the soap to a third-party lab for quality testing.

So, what should travelers think about when they use soap in their hotel rooms?