IRVINE, CALIF.—About one million partly-used bars of soap are disposed of daily by U.S. hotels. With April 22 serving as Earth Day, this month marks the time of year to think about the ways individuals and companies can be less wasteful and more environmentally friendly.
Pacifica Hotels, the largest owner and operator of boutique hotels on the Pacific Coast, keeps this notion top of mind throughout the year. In a partnership with Clean the World, Pacifica Hotels donates partially or unused bars of soap and bath products to be repurposed and donated to impoverished areas. The initiative, which has yielded 5,000 pounds of soap collected from 20 Pacifica properties—2,000 pounds alone from the Belamar Hotel from October 2013 through March 2014—serves to reduce waste, share resources and have a positive global impact.
“Clean the World is a fantastic organization with a great mission,” said Pacifica Hotels’ President Matt Marquis. “They make it easy for us to help with their initiative to donate products to impoverished people who desperately need them to prevent hygiene-related illnesses and deaths. This is one significant way we are curtailing waste from our hotels, and it’s an important one.”
How it works:
1. Clean the World sends containers to each of Pacifica’s 20 participating properties.
2. The containers are marked for soap or shampoo products, and bins are picked up weekly.
3. Soap is taken to Clean the World’s Soap Recycling plant, where it is then put through a sanitization process.
4. Slightly used bars are soaked in a sanitation solution and then ground down into soap noodles and fed through a soap press to produce brand new bars of soap. The soap is then tested for its PH level and cooled for packaging.
5. Tri-Tech Laboratories then tests the soap for sterilization levels and eliminates all pathogens: listeria monocytogenes, Escherichia coli, pseudomonas aeruginosa, salmonella typhimurium and staphylococcus aureus.
6. Products are then donated to impoverished people to prevent the millions of deaths caused by hygiene-related illnesses every day.
Go to Clean the World and Pacifica Hotels.
