By ANNA MARIE BORIA
As the girl opens the box, a smile streams across her face and screams a cry of joy. It was not a toy or a brand new pair of shoes but only a bar of soap. To her, the soap bar can save her life.
Clean the World is a non-profit organization based in Downtown Orlando. This organization began when Clean the World’s president and cofounder Paul Till researched online and discovered that medical research shows the top two killers in children under the age of five are pneumonia and cholera, and learned that 60 percent of those diseases can be prevented through regular hand washing.
Hotels in America alone throw away one million bars of soap each day, this is why Clean the World has partnered with 1,300 hotels in the past three years. In the partnership, hotels give their used soap to Clean the World. Clean the World recycles it, then gives it to countries where it is desperately needed as well as to people who need it in our own community.
“When I leave a hotel I take that last look in the shower and [I would] see that bar of soap left. You really can’t pack a bar of soap like you can the shampoos and thought it to be such a waste [to throw away]. So, I thought this organization really had a simple solution,” Nichole Gordon, a local advocate for Clean the World, said.
The process of recycling the soap begins with surface cleaning, which volunteers do at Clean the World headquarters. The sanitizing process uses an eco-friendly, germ-fighting solution and then rebatches recycled bars into new bars of soap. With the help of a soap press, a machine compacts bars together; it is able to produce 80,000 soap bars per day.
“[What caught my attention about this organization is] the fact that they are utilizing what people are throwing away and making good use out of it,” sophomore Elizabeth Gordon, who has volunteered, said.
Clean the World sends soap to more than 45 different countries including Albania, Armenia, Bolivia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone and Suriname.
“In 10 years, I’d like to see us capture at least 50 percent of the global hospitality market and, by doing so, change the way the hospitality industry deals with hotel waste,” Matt Gomez, Clean the World marketing and communications director, said.
Clean the World has multiple ways in which a person can help. People can text CLEAN to 20222 to donate $10, visit Change the World’s offices to volunteer; they are located at 400 A Pittman St., Orlando, FL 32801 or hold a soap drive. For more information, visit www.cleantheworld.org.
“If you want to be a part of something bigger than you and make an impact in someone’s life [this is the organization to be apart of],” freshman Grayson Gordon said.
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