ORLANDO, Fla. —
A Central Florida nonprofit is giving bars of soap a second life.
Clean the World recycles little bars of soaps from hotels to send to areas in need. Now, some of this much-needed soap is headed to families in California.
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In Orlando, this organization collects something we leave behind in hotels — something you probably never gave two thoughts about.
"We're throwing away a million bars of soap every day across the U.S. and several million in hotels throughout the globe," Shawn Seipler, Clean the World's CEO, said. "When we launched 15 years ago, there were 9,000 children under the age of 5 that die every single day to pneumonia and diarrheal disease. The No. 1 and 2 cause of death of children worldwide. And I found all the studies back then showed if you just gave them soap and taught them how and when to wash their hands, you could cut those deaths in half."
Now, the focus is on California and the thousands who have lost their homes in the fires. Clean the World has sent over 12,000 hygiene kits and plans on sending 15,000 more.
Manufactured in Orlando, the kits come complete with recycled soap and other things that were donated to the nonprofit.
"When you lose your home, you have nothing. You still need to brush your teeth; you still need to wash your hands. You still want to take a shower with all the grief and trauma that people are going through. When you take that shower and you clean yourself, that helps the psyche a little bit," Seipler said.
Seipler says a lot of the people in California do not have the resources or money to rebuild from the fires, adding that they need our help.
The soap from Clean the World is sanitized, melted and remolded. In Central Florida, 300 hotels participate as well as 9,000 worldwide.