Clean the World prepares soap shipment for Haiti

Clean the World started when Nazarene Shawn Seipler and Paul Till began recycling hotel soap and shampoo for people needing hygiene products. Photo courtesy Clean the World.

According to the World Health Organization, the top two killers of children under 5 are acute respiratory infections and diarrhoeal disease. Photo courtesy Clean the World.

In July, Shawn Seipler took a shipment of soap to Haiti, learning firsthand that the average income of $2 a day is not enough to buy soap for many families. Photo courtesy Clean the World.

This summer in Haiti people gathered to receive boxes of soap. Photo courtesy Clean the World.

Orlando resident Amy Sindler recently took recycled soap to Africa to distribute to children in Lesotho. Photo courtesy Clean the World.

Acquiring soap and sanitary water was already a daily struggle for many of the 9 million Haitians living on an average of less than $2 a day in the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.

Tuesday’s 7.0 magnitude earthquake in the capital city of Port-au-Prince dramatically worsened Haitians’ prospects to avoid numerous preventable diseases as utilities are disrupted and people search in vain for adequate shelter.

However, an ingenious idea spawned by a Nazarene and his friend in Florida earlier this year may help Haitians offset some of the unsanitary conditions they’re facing.

Shawn Seipler, who attends Centerpoint Community Church of the Nazarene in Orlando, and his colleague Paul Till, in March 2009 started Clean the World, a nonprofit organization that recycles used hotel soap, shampoo, conditioner and lotion.

Clean the World is assembling a shipment of 200,000 to 400,000 bars of sterilized soap that Royal Caribbean cruise ships will carry to Haiti the weekend of January 22, said William Lowry, Clean the World director of global development. Lowry also attends Centerpoint.

Fill garbage dumps or save lives?
As salesmen who often stayed in hotels during business trips, Seipler and Till got to wondering what happens to all the barely-used complimentary soap and shampoo that guests leave behind in hotel rooms.

They learned that there are 4.6 million hotel rooms in the United States which every day throw away 2.6 million bars of soap, Lowry said. That’s 2.6 million bars of soap going into U.S. landfills.

At the same time, there are nations around the world where millions of people live in unsanitary conditions and without access to clean water. As many as 9,000 children die each day from respiratory illness or diarrheal diseases that could be prevented in many cases by simple handwashing, Lowry said. In Haiti, a bar of soap could go for as much as a day's wages in local dollars.

Having learned these disturbing statistics, Seipler and Till were compelled to quit their jobs and launch Clean the World.

They designed a patent-pending process to sterilize and repackage used hotel hygiene products, after which they work with partners such as Feed the Children and World Vision to ship the soap where it is needed.

Within this first year, they have delivered 200,000 bars of soap to schools, orphanages, clinics and churches in Haiti by working with organizations in Haiti to distribute. They also sent shipments to 13 other countries, in all totalling 230 tons.

Whether they knew it or not. Nazarenes who attended the 2009 General Assembly and Conventions in Orlando this summer were part of the Haiti shipment, said Tawanda Mills, Nazarene Missions International (NMI) director for the Southeast Region, and NMI President of the Central Florida District. The hotels around the Orange County Convention Center are partners with Clean the World, and donated Nazarenes' used soap that has since been used by Haitians.

A win-win
Hotels were eager to partner with the organization, Lowry said. In the past 10 months more than 100 hotels from 17 states have signed on to donate used hygiene products to Clean the World, even paying a small fee to cover the processing and shipping costs.
 
“With a large number of Haitians on our staff and in our community here in South Florida, this tragedy highlights the importance of the commitment we have made to those less fortunate through soap and shampoo recycling and distribution,” Michelle Shulman, director of Public Relations at the Westin Diplomat Resort & Spa, said on the Clean the World blog.

Hotels from 13 countries have asked Clean the World how they can participate, so the organization is developing ideas for how to take the recycling program international.

Hotels benefit in several ways. They’re able to display an image of being sustainable and environmentally friendly. And the hospitality staff who sort the used products develop an increased morale knowing that they are helping to save lives around the world as part of their daily work.

“To be quite honest virtually everyone has reacted the same: ‘I wonder why nobody thought of it before,’” Lowry said.

Hotels aren’t the only ones to get on board. Students in several New York high schools collected and shipped soap bars to Clean the World. The students recruited seven New York hotels to donate their used hygiene products. Marietta soap manufacturer donated 3.5 million bars of soap in July, along with 15 truck loads of other amenities.

Clean the World sterilizes the bars of soap in two ways. The more heavily-used bars are ground up, melted into large batches, cooled and recut into new bars. Soap that has been barely used is steamed at a high temperature. Tri-Tech Laboratories has tested Clean the Water’s sterilization process, finding that the products were completely sterilized (read the study).

The recycling program has grown so quickly that Clean the World has targeted eight more cities across the United States to open soap processing centers in the near future.

Teresa's story
Shawn Seipler wrote on Clean the World's blog about a family he met while traveling in Haiti to distribute soap. Teresa and her children put a face on the global need for affordable and free soap and hygiene products. (The following excerpt is used with permission.)

“Teresa tells me that her kids are always sick, including her oldest daughter, 11 years old, who is constantly coughing in the background. The kids frequently have stomach aches and their skin is very flaky and dry. Their scalps peel. This is diarrheal disease. The intestinal pains and dehydration are the exact symptoms of the fourth leading cause of death amongst children worldwide. And then she quietly tells me that she had another child, a 3 year old boy. She says he died to the illness.

“After succumbing to the pain and dehydration, what would have been her oldest boy now, maybe the man of the house, died, leaving Teresa to bury him. I am not sure what to say. At first, I am silent, and then I tell her that I am sorry for her loss and that I want to stop those deaths.

“I ask if she bathes the children regularly. She says that she wants to but soap is expensive. She works in the gardens and makes very little money. She needs to buy food before soap.

“This boy died over more than 3 years ago. Since his death, I estimate that we have thrown away over 1 billion bars of soap in the United States. Could we have prevented his death? Maybe.”