-
Shawn Seipler, founder and director of Clean the World.
Millions of used bars of soap in hotels end up in the trash every day , a waste with which the American Shawn Seipler and his organizationClean the World helps protect children in 127 countries fromlife-threatening diseases.
For his work in a sales department for a technology company, Seipler had to leave his home in Florida to travel across the United States and sleep four nights a week in hotels.
In one of them, located in Minneapolis, he had one day in 2008 his particular epiphany, which has led him to distribute some 70 million recycled bars of soap around the world. Seipler, born in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, 46 years ago, considered what What happened to the hotel courtesy soaps that many times are used only once and asked at reception.
When he found out that they were going to the trash, he had the idea of using them for the benefit of the nearly 9,000 children who die every year in the world from preventable diseases with good hand washing, such as pneumonia. , cholera or a simple but deadly diarrhoea.
In an interview with Efe he is proud that the company he founded and directs,Clean the World, contribute to the task of reducing the mortality rate of children under 5 years of age due to diseases related to lack of hygiene. From 2009 to 2020, the rate has decreased by 65%, he says.
“That’s millions of kids. There are millions of children”, underlines the head of an organization that claims to be part of the United Nations GWorld WASH group.
ANOTHER GARAGE IDEA
Not only the great ideas behind giants like Apple, Amazon or Microsoft started in a garage. Seipler’s idea of recycling used soaps and donating them to those most in need took his first steps in a very small one.
Using gloves and potato peelers, he and a group of relatives scraped and they recycled a first shipment of used soaps that they collected from nearby hotels. so born Clean the World, which has already donated close to 70 million recycled bars of soap and is present in 127 countries.
In addition, it has prevented more than a thousand tons of hotel waste from ending up in landfills in North America alone. To achieve this, they have signed agreements with more than 8,100 hotels, including large chains such as Marriott, Hyatt, Hilton or Walt Disney Resorts, which in total represent 1.4 million rooms globally.
< strong>ARRIVAL IN HAIT
The first soaps were given to charities in Florida and made their way to Haiti. shortly before the 2010 earthquake, which killed some 300,000 people.
What Seipler saw there it overwhelmed him. They carried a shipment of 2,000 soapsand more than 10,000 people attended a local church. One of them, a mother with her baby; in her arms, she told him that she had already lost two children to diseases that could well have been prevented with that simple combination of fat, caustic solution and water.
" “Since then we have sent about three million bars of soap to that same area, to that church, to those mothers, to make sure they have their needs for soap and hygiene met” ;, explains.
But there are many more areas where these tablets have arrived with a drawing of a child next to soap bubbles and inside the traditional circular recycling symbol: Central America, Ecuador, the Dominican Republic , the border between Mexico and the United States, Somalia or Syria, among many others.
And soon they will also send hygiene kits with soap, shampoo, toothpaste and perhaps hand sanitizer or socks to Poland and Romania, where hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian refugees arrive.fleeing their country due to the Russian invasion.
ETERNAL THANKS
Seipler speaks tenderly of mothers to those who deliver six million bars of soap every year, women victims of “abject poverty” who are grateful that with those products wasted in advanced countries perhaps they won’t have to keep burying their children.
“The proudest moment is when they told me: ‘We pray that you not only bring us more, but that you can bring soap to other mothers in the world who are suffering just like us.’ “, remember.
But that dream of being able to help mothers around the world was in jeopardy. seriously when his initiative was most necessary: the pandemic forced to close thousands of hotels and it was interrupted. the flow of soaps.
The NGO of this entrepreneur who opened his house when he was 7 years old. Since 2017, a lemonade and popcorn street stall has donated more than 32,000 mobile showers so that homeless people can wash up in enclaves around the city where they are also offered services such as mental health counseling. And he is already working on projects to recycle the huge amounts of plastic in the hotel industry and is concerned about the growing insecurity in access to clean water.