STRUTH! Hotels help clean up with used soap

STRUTH !   

IN his continuing search for the more weird, wacky and wondrous in the world of travel, David Ellis says an organisation in America is asking hotels in the country to give it the nearly one-million bars of soap that are only partly-used by guests every day.

Orlando-based Clean the World Foundation is a non-profit organisation that recycles used soap, distributing tens of millions of bars of “new soaps” a year to developing nations, as well as to American homeless shelters.

And it says that it, and another group, Global Soap Project based in Atlanta, are finally starting to get some recognition from America’s largest hotel companies: just last week it reached an agreement with giant Starwood Hotels to give it all its partly-used guest soaps, shampoos and lotions for recycling.

Clean the World says it already has contracts to collect used soaps from around one-thousand individual hotels in America, including 100 within the Marriott and Hilton chains, and others within the Carlson, Wyndham and Hyatt groups.

But the deal with Starwood is its first corporate agreement to cover all hotels of a major network – and it estimates that just this agreement alone will allow it make and distribute – free – to developing nations, a further 15-million, 50gm bars of recycled hand-soaps a year.

www.cleantheworld.org