TIL Many hotels including Hilton and Marriott collect guests’ used soaps, scrape the hair and stuff off, then melt them down to make new soaps.
Used soap from Hilton Hotels is getting a second life.
Used soap from Hilton Hotels is getting a second life.
I’m honestly really glad to hear this. I always figured they just threw it away and it was such a massive waste.
Honestly, as long as it's been shown to be sanitary, I'm so for recycling. Imagine throwing out all that barely used soap? What a waste.
Maybe it's just the crappy hotels I've used, but the soaps are always so small, I need two whole bars to take a shower. I know I'm not in the best of shape, but I ain't that huge.
Yummy, glad to be using some rando's used soap. But on a more serious note as long as it's being done in a way that is sanitary and doesn't risk spreading any diseases then this is much better than producing all that waste.
It's distributed to poor countries interested in free soap. They don't reuse it within the hotel, and people that receive it know it's recycled.
I question if this is actually an efficient way of donating soap, it's quite an intensive process I wouldn't be surprised if this was one of those feel-good things that actual costs more than just making new soap.
Yeah, you could be right that it is just for the feel good press to make them look good. Look at clothes donations. It tanks local textile industries and they're sometimes stuck with piles upon piles of used clothes that don't even look nice. Maybe there's something similar happening here.
One of the people involved in getting this program going has commented on this thread. You should ask them about that. I'd be curious to know the answer.
Hey I actually helped create this program. And as info the soap is given to third party companies, plastic is recycled (if bottled soap / shampoo), then it is hygienically processed and donated to a variety of causes. Let me know if you have any questions, but it's not (for once) horrible capitalism something or reused in the hotels.
Thank you for being part of the solution! With so much waste out there, it's nice to learn that at least some measures like these are being taken.
I'm curious what your job is that this is a program you worked on. Also curious if you had any pushback from hotels or if they reacted positively to the idea from the start.
But now what can I spend all this anger on?
Your life
Obviously this reduces waste which is nice but I was curious, does the program actually save money or does the cost to recycle cost more than what is recovered?
This part is taken care of by 3rd party companies so I can only half answer that. It bring zero savings to the hotel other than a insignificant amount less garbage that is taken away.
Recycling like this is much better and easier because you have large quantities of the same types of plastic all together. This makes processing, sorting and recycling easier. The soap itself is easy to process
Great, I was always a bit upset thinking of all of them going to waste.
the hair and stuff off
What..what other kind of stuff are we talking about 🫣
Little bits of shower oreos
Whatever it is, I bet it's not going to waste either.
Here ya go. Mike Rowe has a good way of going through all of that “and stuff” convo. Dirty Jobs FTW https://youtu.be/_ndZ9PnqKw8
I wish they'd just put the soap and shampoo in fixed dispenser units like in the hand soap in a public bathroom. No stupid little bottle of shampoo where there's more plastic than shampoo.
I've been in a few hotels this year and every one of them has done this. They put them in locked in containers that you can't really contaminate.
Yeah. This is a nice idea to deal with the problem, but why are they perpetuating the problem? Why continue to use bar soaps that constantly need to be collected? Do customers throw a fit if they have liquid soap?
Here is video about it, if you want to see the process: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qJV34pcOaw
Good video, just the one I was thinking of. During the pandemic my company sent employees boxes of sanitation kits to assemble and bag and then donate to homeless shelters. The kit included these remanufactured soap bars, along with unused random hotel lotion and shampoo, sample tubes of toothpaste, very cheap white toothbrushes, and moist towelettes.
While I am all in for recycling, this was something I didn't want to know.
Reduce, reuse, recycle!
This is why I always take the hotel soap with me
Ah finally, sustainability!
Nah, probably just capitalism.
Win-win then?
