How Handwashing Saves Lives in the Developing World

Every day, thousands of children in the developing world die from preventable diseases—because they lack soap.    

In this powerful episode, I speak with Shawn Seipler, founder of Clean the World, whose mission is to deliver 75 million soap bars to 127 countries.

Discover how recycled soap is saving lives—and how one simple idea sparked a global hygiene revolution. 

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Transcript

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HOST: Jennifer (00:02): Hello, welcome to this podcast called FINDING INSPIRATION. It's a 20 or so minute weekly podcast where we interview someone with an amazing story. After the show, I know you're gonna feel energized, invigorated, and inspired. I'm Jennifer Weissmann. Welcome to FINDING INSPIRATION. What if I told you that the little bar of soap you use in your hotel shower, maybe once or twice could actually go on and save millions of lives? I don't think you'd believe me, but I am gonna change your mind today. We're speaking with the founder of Clean The World, Mr. Shawn Seipler. He's gonna talk about how recycled soap is saving millions of young lives around the world.

GUEST: Shawn (00:53): Thirteen years ago, I ran a global sales team for a technology company, and I was on the road four nights a week. I always had an entrepreneurial spirit. I was a serial entrepreneur if you will.  I had my first lemonade stand and success at the age of seven. I always wanted to start my own business and made a couple of attempts. At that time, 13 years ago, I was thinking about sustainability and green technology as an entrepreneur. That would be something the world needed and certainly would be relevant for many years to come. So I was looking for items of waste. I managed two accounts directly that were in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Minneapolis is a very cold place and I'm originally from South Florida. So I have very thin warm-blooded veins.

HOST: Jennifer (01:42): So that's what you do when you're traveling for business and it's super cold in Minneapolis. Do you stare at soap in your hotel room?

GUEST: Shawn (01:48):  And drink to stay warm, to stay alive. That's exactly right. And it was the middle of a winter day in Minneapolis. And I was thinking: I wonder what happens to the soap because my normal four-day schedule would usually find me in four different cities. So I never took the bar of soap or bottle of shampoo with me. I called the front desk and asked what happened to the bar of soap and bottled shampoo when I was done using it. And they chuckled and they said – excuse me sir, do you want another cocktail? I said: “Sure, that'll work. But I'd like to know what happens.”  And they said we throw it away. So I thought that was interesting. I immediately went to my computer and did a little bit of research. And at that time, in 2009, there were 4.6 million hotel rooms in the United States.

GUEST: Shawn (02:31): n And there was a 60% occupancy rate and the average stay was one and a half-day. I did some quick back-of-envelope math and said -- if all hotels across the United States were throwing their soap away, that was a few million bars of soap a day. And I extrapolated that out globally. The number was probably 4 to 5 million bars of soap every day that was being thrown away. I thought that's an interesting thing and that's a lot of waste. Over the upcoming days and weeks, I went down the track if could I recycle soap and found some very simple ways to really melt it down and reform it into a new bar.

HOST: Jennifer (03:12):  Please tell me you cleaned the leftover soap from the hotel bathroom.

GUEST: Shawn (03:15):  Yes, if you're a soap maker you generally add new ingredients. They're not dirty. They don't need to be sanitized. So just that act from a rebatching perspective, just sort of melting down, reforming that's usually done with the smaller boutique soap makers.  I knew there was something there and that I could get a bar of soap recycled. There was still a lot to learn in terms of surface cleaning it and sterilizing and all the things that we eventually had to do. But I knew we could do something. We could recycle it. Then the tack became: okay, what am I gonna do with recycled soap? So I asked a few family members -- if they went to Whole Foods and there was a recycled bar of soap ....

GUEST: Shawn (04:02):  Would you buy it? They all said no. And I thought, could I send it? I just didn't know that led down a track where I found a study in a 2nd study and a 3rd study and ended up finding about 10 studies. They all said the same thing. Again, this is 2009. At that time, there were 9,000 children under the age of five that were dying every single day to pneumonia and diarrhea disease. #1 and #2 leading causes of death amongst children under the age of five worldwide --- in every one of these studies said that if you just gave them soap and taught them how and when to wash their hands, you could cut those deaths in half. And that was literally the moment the light bulb went off. Wow. We could take all this used soap from hotels when guests are done using them, recycle it and send it to children around the world. I mean, there are 9,000 children dying and there are millions of bars of soap available every day. I just gotta figure out how to get the millions of bars to the 9,000 children. And that was the moment that the Clean The World idea was born.

HOST: Jennifer (05:14): So the stars align and you decide, you're gonna figure out a way to grab the soap from the hotels and get it to the kids that really need it. What did you do?

GUEST: Shawn (05:22):  Immediately, like within the next few sort of days? I started to recycle soap in my kitchen. And as I went on business trips, I would find myself running into various hotel rooms that housekeepers were cleaning. And I was literally trying to grab used soap and dirty soap. Can you imagine putting all that in a bag and then shoveling that around through my trips to bring it to my home kitchen and literally do batches.  I was testing how much water and how much heat and how to cook it.  I remember my mother giving us our first piece of equipment, which was a food processor to chop up all the soap and be able to flake it so that I could cook it.

GUEST: Shawn (06:09):  Eventually I started telling the idea to my family members.  I am half German and half Puerto Rican.  I went to my German family members and I said "I've got this great idea. We're gonna take you soap from hotels, recycle it. We're gonna give it to people all over the world. And they said, please do not quit your day job. " That doesn't sound like a great idea.   So I switched my pitch up a little bit. I went to my Puerto Rican family members and I said "I'veve got this great idea. We're gonna take soap from hotels. We're gonna recycle it. And we're gonna save children's lives all over the world."  And all my Puerto Rican family members said, -- we're in tell us what we need to do. Literally got into my cousin's single car garage, me and, and my Puerto Rican family members.

GUEST: Shawn (06:51):  And we sat around on upside down pickle buckets. We were collecting soap from hotels in the Orlando area  hotels and just bringing it into this single-car garage factory. We all sat around on upside-down pickle buckets with potato peels, and we would scrape the outside of bars of soap first to surface clean it. Then we took those surface clean bars and we put 'em into a meat grinder and the meat grinder would grind it up into like a spaghetti noodle. And then we had these cookers -- 10 cookers.  We would put the soap in these cookers, we'd cook it for a couple of hours that would cook out all the impurities that would turn it into a paste.  When it was done cooking, we had these big wood soap molds, and we would put wax paper down, we'd put the paste on, put another layer of wax paper, top it, clamp it, let it sit.

GUEST: Shawn (07:41): It would dry overnight. The next day we had wire cutters and we would cut the soap out from the wooden molds. And then we put the soap on racks and we had fans that were blowing it dry for another 24 hours.  The music always had to be playing with my Puerto Rican workforce.  The power would cut in the house about every 30 minutes. So you could only have so many cookers on when the meat grinder was going and because if the music stopped, the production stopped. So we had to maintain the music.  Here's is a true story:  The Police drove by the garage and they were very curious to see what all of us Puerto Ricans were cooking.

HOST: Jennifer (08:21): Oh what a site that must have been, are you serious?

GUEST: Shawn (08:26):  So they literally came out and they came in the garage and I gave them a tour. And of course it smelled like soap and it looked like soap and they determined it was soap <laugh>. And, uh, that was literally how we started in that single car garage, just cooking soap and, and doing everything we could to save lives.

HOST: Jennifer (08:42):

So just back up a second, I just wanna understand this while you were working for this company, you were going around picking up used soap from various bathrooms in various hotels, grabbing it in a plastic bag and bringing it back home with you inside of your suitcase. Is that right?

GUEST: Shawn (08:59):

Not only that, I was such a good boss that my, the, the, the, the executives and national sales managers that worked for me, I made them do it as well. So the, so I was literally just talking to one of them, uh, last week who worked for me at that time. And he said, do you remember when you used to travel and used to make us run into rooms and grab you soap? And, uh, I said, yes, I do remember, and look at the result of that today. So, uh, so yes, I not, not just myself, but I actually directed folks to go out and get that soap because I had to, I had to figure it out. I had to see if it would work.

HOST: Jennifer (09:31):

I'm really hoping. You're gonna say things have come a long way since upside down pickle buckets. What's going on with clean the world today in 2022.

GUEST: Shawn (09:38):

So today we have recycling operational centers across the globe. We have a center, Orlando, Las Vegas, Montreal, uh, Punte Amsterdam, and in Hong Kong, uh, we are opening one in mainland China. We operate about 8,000 hotels across north America, the Caribbean, where across the EU and UK. And then we also operate hotels in Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore, Taiwan, Japan, again, soon, hopefully into mainland China. Uh, we have sent in 13 years, we have distributed about 75 million free bars of soap to children and mothers across the globe, 127 countries across the globe where we have distributed, uh, soap and product. We respond to, uh, relief humanitarian efforts. So we are right now, we're coordinating with a, a, a great partner of ours to get soap, uh, into Romania, Poland, and then eventually into Ukraine to help, uh, those in Ukraine. Uh, we have helped, uh, Somalian, refugees, Syrian refugees, uh, Southern border of the United States, every typhoon hurricane, the Haiti earthquake.

GUEST: Shawn (10:48):

That was really the first major humanitarian response we had that happened on January 12th, 2010. And, uh, we were on the ground immediately handing soap out to those intense cities because when natural disasters occur, when, uh, displacement occurs, uh, you don't think about the hygiene side of it and a, a bad hygiene episode. Um, if you recall back in after the Haiti earthquake, not, not too many months after that, there was a major cholera outbreak. And you see that times, um, you know, in the Southeast Asia, when you have after typhoons and flooding and, and when water rises, you see the, the chole and the dysentery spread, and you just don't think about the importance of soap and hygiene. So that's what we do now much, much, much, much bigger of an operation than that single car garage on the upside down pickle buckets with potato peels.

HOST: Jennifer (11:37):

<laugh> Sean. I'd love to hear some stories actually on the ground stories of parents and mothers and fathers, who've been grateful to receive the soap that you're creating and giving to them. Can you share any real life stories with us?

GUEST: Shawn (11:52):

I have some really impactful stories. Um, our first trip to Haiti was in the summer of 2009. We only had 2000 bars of soap that we had made in the garage. We loaded that on a propeller airplane, and we flew into the Northern part of Haiti into caption from the airport, loaded up cars, and went right to a church service. That was at one o'clock on a Wednesday afternoon, middle of July. It is hot steamy. We come into the back of this major building and in Haiti, most of the buildings don't have roofs on them, because if you don't have a roof, you don't end up paying taxes. So most of the, most of the structures just are all open aired on the, on the second level or top level. So we come into the back of this church. When I walk through the inner of the building and come out to the front end, there are 10,000 people in this church building with no roof, one o'clock Wednesday afternoon, and we have 2000 bars of soap.

GUEST: Shawn (12:47):

First thing I'm thinking is we don't have nearly enough soap as the, uh, pastor Brutus, who is our Caribbean director, who is the, uh, uh, one of the heads of the evangelical church of Haiti, who kind of set us up into this, this church. He starts calling up people who have had specifically mothers who have had children that passed away to cholera and to dysentery one by one, we had mothers coming up who did not have access to soap, who did not understand, uh, when and, and how and the why on soap. So many of them were, had a child in their hand and were telling us about the children that they buried, or the two children that they buried and how they understand we had just given them sort of a lesson on soap. They understand why they need it. And they were appreciative of what we were giving them and asking us to continue to come back and to give them more soap.

GUEST: Shawn (13:41):

And so that impacted me to see these mothers who were literally were lining up to share their stories of their children that had died. I remember in the Dominican Republic and in Honduras, we oftentimes, when we hand soap out, uh, we have a song that's an educational song that goes with it. It's a, it's a washer, hand song that is set to the tune of lubaba. Uh, and, uh, Habbo Habbo. So we, and we have a skit wear super HaBO, super soap, and super Agua. They're the superheroes. And they beat the header, Menez the germs. And so the germs will go out and they'll usually it's mothers and kids. And so the, the germs will go out and they'll make noise and they'll make, you know, sounds, and the kids will scream and then super Agua and super HaBO. They will come out and they'll kill the germ.

GUEST: Shawn (14:41):

And then we'll hand out soap. And I, I could just remember handing out and having so many women crying. They're so grateful. They're hugging us, they're kissing us. They are saying to us that they are praying for us to, to, and this is where it's really just the irony in is like, we're praying for you. So you can bring more soap to other mothers around the world. So you can give this to, to, to women who need around the world. And it's a, it's, it's a bar soap that we throw away millions of times a day outta hotels across the globe. And yet mothers are just literally weeping and grateful and so ecstatic and spiritually connected to it, uh, because they understand the value and the gift and so appreciative. So those things have really stuck with me. Those moments have really stuck with me to see what, uh, what the appreciation that, that, that happens from a little bar soap.

GUEST: Shawn (15:35):

So there was a hygiene revolution that occurred. The hygiene revolution came about in Chicago, in New York, in London, in places where you had high congested, lots of folks started to understand what soap meant and its power and how it would help save lives. And, and this is when consumer brands that we know of today when they really launched out, uh, because they understood the importance of the health. The study literally concluded that because children get baths in developed countries, they have a better opportunity to learn, to digest, to have cognitive skills than those in developing countries, because they use so much of their body's growth energy, uh, to literally fight disease and pathogen and not develop their brain. It, it, it literally comes down to de develop countries and economies may simply be that way because there's soap in hygiene and clean water and baths available to children versus in the developing countries that have dirty water, don't have soap, do not have hygiene, do not have some of those basic needs.

HOST: Jennifer (16:39):

So now I have to have some question, Sean, how does clean the world make money? It's not a bad word. How does it make money

GUEST: Shawn (16:46):

Early on in, uh, the garage days, we thought we would just be a 5 0 1 C, three nonprofit, and we would seek donations. If you recall, back then the economy was in a, uh, tough spot. And, uh, I had never operated in a non-profit environ, a nonprofit environment. And so therefore had a hard time getting somebody to, uh, give me money for a, for a mission. Uh, I was used to selling technology and other deals. And so there was always an ROI and there was somebody would pay you for services early on. We really were, um, failing financially. Um, we were unable to, to, to use that donation model. And so we really sat back and said, you know, we're providing a value to hotels. The value that we're providing includes taking away their trash, their waste that they would otherwise give to their waste management vendor.

GUEST: Shawn (17:32):

We are giving them a green sustainable program that hotel guests want and care about. We're giving them a socially impactful program, uh, that they can talk about. They can put in their social media, they can put, press releases around. They can market. We're giving them a program. That's a really awesome human resource program, those room at attendants and those housekeepers they're coming from countries that we are ultimately sending soap back to when they know and hear that their hotel and that their corporate brands are participating in this program that helps get soap back to Honduras and Guatemala and Mexico and Dominican Republic, their energy and their excitement, not just for our program and for the hotel, but for other green and sustainable programs that the hotel is, is trying to, to implement it increases, and they care a lot more about it. You know what, that's a value, there's a value there.

GUEST: Shawn (18:17):

So we created a hotel recycling program fee. And so today, those 8,000 hotels, they are paying customers. We also created a hybrid model. So we have a 5 0 1 C three, and we have a for profit B Corp beneficiary Corp. Those hotels pay on average between 50 cents to 80 cents per room per month for our program. So they're paying a hundred room hotels paying 50 bucks to 80 bucks a month. That includes all of their bins, all of their implementation materials. It includes all of the shipping of empty bins to their properties, and then the shipping of the full bins back to our recycling centers. Uh, and it includes all of their impact statements. So they know exactly at the hotel level, at the management company level, at the corporate flag level, they know exactly how much landfill diversion, how much space they've saved in a landfill, how much water savings, power savings, how much carbon savings, and then how many lives they're touching, how many hand washes they've handed out, how many people have gotten access to the soap that's come out of their hotels. And so that impact reporting not only falls in line with hotels, uh, uh, ESGs, and we also give them their United nations, sustainable development goals, areas that they're impacting. So they know what they're doing with respect to UN SDGs. They know what they're doing with respect to sustainability and impact. Uh, and they're able to market that. They're able to talk about that. They're able to put that in their global citizenship reports, which is a value that now hits marketing, branding, ESG, sustainability, waste reduction, et cetera.

HOST: Jennifer (19:51):

Sean, what you're doing is unbelievable. I don't know anyone in the first world countries whose kids are dying of diarrhea. I mean, the fact that you're changing lives this way is, is amazing. I wish you continued success and I know clean the world is gonna be spreading their clean message all over the world.

GUEST: Shawn (20:09):

Thank you so much. So grateful. So happy to come on your show as well. Thank you, Jennifer.

HOST: Jennifer (20:17):

Thank you for joining us this week on finding inspiration. Hey, I would appreciate it. If you would click on that subscribe button and share this podcast with a friend, see you next week. I'm Jennifer Weissman.