ORLANDO, Fla. – At the Clean The World warehouse in Orlando, they’re turning trash into treasure.
Conveyor belts roll, forklifts beep and volunteers sort, stack and box away recycled soap.
News 6 first reported on the nonprofit back in 2010. They had just moved out of their home workshop where they started.
This year they are celebrating 15 years of creating lifesaving, essential supplies for communities in need across the globe..
The nonprofit recycles used hotel soap and ships it around the world to people who desperately need it.
Clean the World Founder & CEO, Shawn Seipler gave us a tour.
“This is our volunteer center,” Seipler said. “This is where we have eight to ten thousand people come in every year to get their hands dirty recycling soap.”
The nonprofit has come a long way from its humble beginnings.
“This is us sitting on pickle buckets. We had potato peelers to scrape the outside of the bars,” Seipler said pointing to an old photo on the wall. “We had a meat grinder to grind them into noodles, very similar to what we do today. And we would cook it in these Kenmore cookers.”
Seipler said he used to travel a lot for work and got the idea after one of his stays.
“I was a frequent traveler staying in a hotel room, and I called the front desk one day to ask what happened to the soap when I was done with it. They said it was thrown away,” Seipler said. “I did some quick research and figured out that with the 4.6 million hotel rooms we had at that time, and the occupancy rate and the average rate of stay, we were throwing away about a million bars of soap every day.”
Seipler has gotten results, the nonprofit has shipped 82 million bars of soap to children and families in 127 countries.
They’ve diverted 25 million pounds of waste from landfills.
“When we were scraping soap with potato peelers, we knew there were millions of bars of soap being thrown away every day.” Seipler said. “And there were thousands of children dying every day. We just needed to get that soap into the hands of those children.”
Seipler started The Wash Foundation a global NGO to distribute the soap and other hygiene products.
“The number that is the most important is when we started 15 years ago, there were 9000 children under the age of five dying every day to hygiene-related illnesses,” Seipler said. ”Today that number has dropped by more than 65%. We are credited with really helping to drive that and assist that so much so that the United Nations added clean The Wash Foundation to the United Nations Global wash cluster. So we actually drive global strategies on water, sanitation, hygiene. And again, we started in a garage in downtown Orlando 15 years ago.”
Clean the World is always looking for volunteers. You will have the opportunity to visit their one-of-a-kind Soap Museum and to volunteer to support The WASH Foundation by sorting out the soap bars and plastic bottle amenities that Clean the World collects from the hospitality industry and recycles. You may also pack the recycled soap into boxes that are then distributed via global NGOs, such as The WASH Foundation.
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