Other People Use The Bars Of Soap You Use In Hotel Rooms

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There are over 17.5 million hotel rooms in the world, and anyone who stays in them expects a clean and safe environment. That could lead to a lot of waste for items that might be thrown out after a guest leaves, like used shampoo, conditioner, and soap. Some hotels now use refillable dispensers in bathrooms, as opposed to individual containers and bars, but many continue to go with a traditional bar of soap - and often more than one since they are placed next to every sink and in every shower and/or bath. But throwing out that much soap can't be great for the environment. Thankfully, there is another option that a lot of hotels are using - recycling the soap into new bars.

It's something over 8,100 hotels worldwide do, amounting to over 1.4 million rooms, and Science Insider documented how it works in a recent TikTok video. In it, they visit a soap recycling factory owned by the Orlando-based company Clean The World, and show how the leftover soap first goes through a refiner that cleans the dirt and hair off the top layers of the bars, then pushes out noodle-like strands. The strands are heated and mixed with water and bleach to be sanitized, they're refined once again, and then they're molded into new bars.

Per Clean The World, the soap is then sent to children and families in countries that have a "high death rate due to acute respiratory infection (pneumonia), and diarrheal diseases (cholera), which are two of the top killers of children under five." They've already distributed 70 million bars in 127 countries since 2009. For their mission of a "global hygiene revolution," they've partnered with hotel chains like Hilton, Hyatt, Marriott, Mandarin Oriental, Best Western, Hard Rock, Kalahari and more, who pay the company $1 per room per month to recycle the soap. So if you've stayed at one of those chains and washed up in your room, your soap might now be helping others.