Ever lay awake at night wondering what happens to all the old unused bars of hotel soap you and millions of others have tossed away over the years? Nope, us neither.
However, if you are actually wondering now, you'll be pleased to know we've got an answer for you. The truth is, a lot of the stuff gets discarded every day.
Think about it, if you use a bar of hotel soap once you're hardly going to wrap it back up and pack it away in your suitcase, are you?
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What's more, in order for a hotel to be deemed 5*, the soap must be replaced on a daily basis even if it hasn't been touched.
That's a huge amount of wasted soap. In fact, it's estimated that in the US alone, over a million bars of soap are tossed each and every day. That number could be more like 5 million worldwide.
Credit: Clean the World
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But fear not, because if you're staying at select hotels, your old soap could be embarking on a very different journey when you check out.
Orlando-based firm Clean the World have spotted the problem and have taken to collecting old bars of discarded hotel soap, melting them down and turning them into brand new bars to send off to impoverished countries.
Clean the World was set up by Shawn Seipler who during a previous role within a tech company, found himself staying in hotels a lot for work.
On one presumably very, very dull night alone in his room, Shawn began to wonder about what might become of his used bar of complimentary soap.
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"I called down to the front desk and asked what they did with all the leftover soap," he told Thrillist.
The receptionist replied that the old soap simply gets thrown in the rubbish.
Appalled at the way things were handled, Shawn got to work investigating the issue.
"That," he says, "is when I learned about rebatching."
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Rebatching is the process whereby old soap is melted down and formed into new bars. Learning about the number of people who lose their lives worldwide every year due to diseases that could be prevented by proper hygiene, he got to work devising a solution.
Credit: Clean the World
"Then it was just a matter of figuring out how to get the soap to recycle, and getting into their hands," he said. "It was an aha moment, and I realised this was my calling.
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"I called my Puerto Rican relatives and they said 'let's do it.' Pretty soon we were sitting in my garage on pickle buckets with vegetable peelers, cooking soap."
Credit: Clean the World
And with that, Clean the World was born, solving the issue or wasted hotel soap for good. However, there's still a lot of work to be done.
At the moment, around 5,000 hotels in the States are participating in the programme.
"There's a whole world of hotels out there we can get to start donating," he said. "Right now we've got 20 percent of all hotels in the US. That's a lot of room to grow, and a lot of soap to make."
Source: Thrillist