Saving the world just got a whole lot easier:





Saving Cambodian lives with slivers of hotel soap

Sometimes a good idea can bubble up from something as small as a hotel room bar of soap.

That’s what happened when Samir Lakhani, a senior environmental studies major at the University of Pittsburgh, went to Cambodia last summer to build ponds for a commercial fish-raising project in rural villages and stumbled onto what could be a solution to that Southeast Asian nation’s historic and deadly hygiene problem.

“I saw mothers bathing babies in laundry detergent and doing dishes, pots and pans, in the powdered detergent too. It’s not the right kind of soap and it’s a horrifying sight,” said Mr. Lakhani, 22, who grew up in Allentown, Lehigh County. “It’s a rural culture that defecates openly and has no history of handwashing."

One out of eight Cambodian children die from a preventable disease before they reach the age of 5, according to a United Nations study. And it’s no coincidence that 75 percent of the nation’s rural population of 13 million can’t put their hands on a bar of soap to work up a cleansing lather, Mr. Lakhani said.

Such handwashing could reduce the risk of death from disease or infection by up to 60 percent, and Mr. Lakhani thinks he’s found a solution to the soap supply problem at the legendary Angkor Wat temples. The 800-year-old World Heritage Site, located in the northern part of Cambodia, attracts 2 million tourists a year, and is surrounded by 350 hotels and guest houses that cater to the visitors.

Those hotels and guesthouses throw away thousands of once or twice used bars of soap a day.

To start to get that soap into the hands of Cambodia’s rural population, Mr. Lakhani formed Eco-Soap Bank. The non-profit collects the tiny, used soap bars from the tourist hotels, sanitizes, grates and melts them into a liquid, packages the liquid soap in clean, recycled plastic bottles, and then distributes them in rural villages, medical clinics and schools.

“We’re collecting soap from only 20 of the hotels now. We want to do more, but we’re already getting two tons a month,” Mr. Lakhani said. “We have soap coming out of our ears already, and the raw supply is just about limitless.”

So is the need. Sanitation is a problem throughout rural Cambodia, just as it is in many developing nations, where, according to the World Health Organization, the leading cause of death for children is hygiene-related illness, like diarrhea, the common cold, pneumonia, giardiasis and other intestinal tract diseases, respiratory diseases and food-borne diseases..

A host of international non-profit organizations have formed over the past decade to link the need for better hygiene in developing nations to the burgeoning soap waste stream produced by the tourist hotel industry. Many of those programs are headquartered in the U.S., where 2.6 million soap bars are thrown away by hotels every day.

Clean the World, based in Orlando, Fla., is the largest global recycler of soap from the hospitality industry, operating in partnership with 2,290 hotels and resorts. Since it was founded in 2009, its website states it has distributed more than 22 million bars of soap to children and families in 96 nations. And, Mr. Lakhani said, the non-profit recently agreed to provide 50,000 soap bars for shipment to West Africa in partnership with Pittsburgh-based Brother's Brother Foundation, to help in curbing the spread of the Ebola virus. .

The Global Soap Project — its motto: “Raising the Bar on Global Hygiene” — is based in Atlanta, collects soaps from hotels with 150,000 rooms in the U.S. and distributes the soap to 32 countries on four continents. And the Las Vegas-based Global Soap Project collects used bars of soap from Las Vegas hotels and, after processing and sanitizing, ships soap to refugee camps in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Eco-Soap is different, Mr. Lakhani said, because it avoids the high costs of transporting recycled soap from the U.S. to underdeveloped countries by using waste soap already in Cambodia and supporting local communities where the reprocessing is done.

“The problem with some of these centralized programs is they’re sitting on a mountain of sop because it’s too costly to ship,” he said. “We don’t have that problem because we’re right in the middle of the communities that need it. In fact, any country with a significant tourist industry is perfect for establishment of a soap bank.”

Eco-Soap has five employees at its Cambodian soap processing facility and office in Siem Reab, a tourist town near the Angkor Wat temples. It partners with five nearby schools and with eight Cambodian NGOs (non-government organizations) to distribute the soap and educate rural residents on the health benefits of handwashing.

“We would prefer to partner too with village leaders and schools where we can teach good sanitation practices,” he said. “And the beauty of the soap recycling process we use is it can be done with simple equipment and can be done in the rural villages.......

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http://www.post-gazette.com/local/2015/ ... 1504050068

General Mackevili wrote:Sounds dirty to me. I would love to know the number of lives they think they've saved already. I bet the villagers don't even use them and just sell them back to the hotels, LoL.

Saving the hotels. :p

m'yang m'nak :p

I used to do this as a kid....my mum bought a similar device to press old bits of soap into a new bar...Shield for the boys and Lux for mum....used to make a nice pattern...
my mother was green without even knowing it, and my paternal grandfather wouldn't let walk past a single nail without picking it up and putting it in a jar for later use....
this is just common sense
we should reuse more, why, I have even been known to use a Jonny twice!

I should say I remember as a 19 year old boy , when he died, chucking those nails in the bin....when I had the task to clear his house...
Sorry Freddy

do you put a charlie on your bell-end?


why then, yes sir....are you as green as me.....



PS
no stories about glad-wrap/cling-film....that not green.....

oh I just got it....I was always too cheap to try....lol....did you