Recycling partially used soap is a good idea. Making sure everyone around the world has access to soap is certainly super important.
There's really no reason US recycled soap needs to be the soap that is sent to (eg) Africa, shipped over oceans. Doesn't (eg) Africa have it's own soap production facilities? But I guess American consumers would be unwilling to use recycled soap? Or just the neat connection between the soap collected in one place and delivered to those poor unfortunates overseas is what's necessary to get funding and other support? Nobody wants to fund just paying for soap in (say) Africa or just recycling soap in the US, I guess.
Causing "60%+ reduction in the number of children who die from diarrheal diseases each year" -- is a pretty stunning claim. Looking closer... I guess they're simply saying that children ding of such diseases had dropped by 60% from 1990 to 2020, not that they alone are responsible for that? Just that they've "helped" to some unknown extent? I bet most readers didn't catch that. That seems a bit dishonest actually. Still, even the 60% reduction in such deaths over 20 years alone is pretty great and I hadn't known about it! (I believe this is one of the leading causes of death in man parts of the world -- or used to be?). I suspect this particular effort had a pretty minimal contribution to those numbers.
I apologize if this just comes off as "jaded old man", but I have gotten warier as I've gotten older of the real harms of first world countries dumping all this "aid" on the third world and calling it charity. It's not hard to see how tons of free food, 2nd hand clothing, and even things like recycled soap could undercut any native producers in these third world countries, making them perpetually dependent on aid.
That dependency was a large part of Nestle's strategy in providing baby formulae in Africa. They would supply each new mother with - if I'm not mistaken - one month or three month's worth of formulae. Just enough so that she would stop lactating, but require them to now purchase many month's worth of formulae at prices that they really could not afford.
>>> That dependency was a large part of Nestle's strategy in providing baby formulae in Africa. They would supply each new mother with - if I'm not mistaken - one month or three month's worth of formulae. Just enough so that she would stop lactating, but require them to now purchase many month's worth of formulae at prices that they really could not afford.
> FWIW there were widespread, decades-long boycotts of Nestle due to their baby formula marketing:
What imperialism and neo-colonialism controlled by european-descended cultures have done to exploit the rest of the world is so terrible that it almost sounds like science fiction, and we in the countries on the taking end mostly manage to avoid knowing about it. It is ongoing.
It's because those countries don't protect themselves from foreign predatory selling. Developed countries have all sorts of restrictions on what their own citizens can import, what can be sold locally, even what free gifts they can accept, to prevent prevent that sort of exploitation. But the common feature of poor countries is that they're bad at self-governing, so they're kind of at the mercy of everyone else. What can other people do about that? Regime change? That's been tried a lot and doesn't work.
I know this sounds cold, but blaming what foreigners do on them is kind of fruitless. There are so many of them waiting to exploit anyone. It's like blaming foreign hackers for hacking your computers or even blaming the weather for blowing down your fence. Yes, it's technically their fault, but you're never going to eliminate those outside forces so you'd better improve your own security.
Not sure why you singled out the ethnicity of the people in those foreign countries since China does it too now.
You need to realize that a lot of this is pushed on developing nations through the IMF and other organizations that force countries to sign extremely poor deals out of desperation.
How exactly do you expect a country to stop stronger countries when they have a weak government, military, social services, and treasury?
I know you already declared it "fruitless" but it's worth looking into the decades that the USA and other countries spent using all the political, economic, and military force they could to prevent these countries from protecting themselves from foreign predatory selling, it's probably part of the picture.
You do realize that a common feature of these poor countries is non-stop meddling in their local affairs, especially by the West. If there is a politician or political group that would affect the flow of resources out of said country, then they end up having a regime change or their opposition receives a wealth of arms and/or money.
Nestle used the same marketing techniques in every country. In the United States today approx. 70% of babies are fed entirely or partially using formula. If that number surprises you, then maybe that's a hint to check your privilege.
Don't forget that one of the major exports of "European cultures"--including European-educated people from elsewhere--is manufactured outrage.
Making a buck off of poor people is hardly unique to European culture.
> If that number surprises you, then maybe that's a hint to check your privilege.
Has "check your privilege" become so cliché that it's just spewed out where it doesn't make sense? I'm honestly trying to understand what kind of "privilege" leads to one being unaware of baby formula statistics.
The phrase is idiotic and I hate it, but in this case it's presumably about education level, or the ability to breastfeed a baby without having to go to work and have someone else take care of it.
It's just such a weird statistic to flex on. I'm upper middle class, and I'm honestly surprised the number is that low, because pretty much every mother I know has used baby formula at some point. It's not ever anything I associated with class or education.
>Nestle used the same marketing techniques in every country. In the United States today approx. 70% of babies are fed entirely or partially using formula.
I have 4 kids, the oldest is 7. I can assure you, there was no nefarious formula marketing going on when my wife was pregnant.
Also, there is a really bug difference between what was being described in Africa and "a baby partially on formula". There were times when we leaned on formula - and it was beneficial. There are moms who are dependent on formula and it is a good thing.
But let's not confuse those positive sides of formula from Nestlé pushing formula in Africa.
Oh no, it's certainly not unique to European culture. The rich of Europe, and of other settler-colonies set up by Europe like the USA, have just been the most successful at it for the past few hundred years, including at extracting profit from most other parts of the planet to the benefit of the European (and European-founded/dominated) parts. phenomenally successful.
The comment being replied to is specifically about "imperialism and neo-colonialism". How nestle acts in different countries, in that context, is not whataboutism.
Not just in Africa. There was a huge ad campaign in the US a few decades ago implying that Enfamil and Similac were healthier options than breast feeding. This was pushed especially hard in economically depressed areas that could least afford it.
Not altogether unlike the ad campaigns convincing folks that (free) water with a meal was vaguely wrong. "By they way," they said, "we've got some special brown water with a fukton of added sugar and CO2 for sale instead!"
It's not hard for these companies to bribe politicians to allow welfare recipients to buy their products through snap/food stamps/ebt by getting exemptions. It's very devious and wrong.
Also the most logical choice given that it's a hard sell for wealthy, stay-at-home moms rather than women who need to work and don't have the necessary time to breastfeed.
Also, do not attribute to malice what can be attributed to negligence.
I was about to blow the outrage horn but decided to do some reading. After going over the entire wiki, i could not find any single shred of evidence that could even suggest outright malice or worse, criminality, from nestle.
I remain open minded, but I'd like to see evidence that justifies the claims.
Currently, the accusations seem based on selective facts & theory, used to form a narrative that is questionable at best.
However, nowhere in the article did i see any mention of any of the positive effects by nestle donations.
Here are some counterfactuals:
1- most men do not realize that women may not produce milk for several days despite lactating nonstop during this time. Newborns in such cases will be inmediately be given formula before jaundice sets in. Nestle probably (unintentionally) saved countless children from death this way.
2- formula and breatsfeeding are not mutually exclusive. The notion that free formula would impair the ability of women to continue breastfeeding is not true, as many dads will attest.
3- Africa life expectancy / health outcomes are poor. In any emergency, you do want to have formula as a fallback option
4- this article presents african women as naive with zero proof.
Well as far as “blaming Big Pharma for the opioid epidemic”, when drug abuse was affecting the “inner city” it was because of “poor morals”, “the lack of fathers” and “people not taking responsibility for themselves”.
But when drug abuse started affecting “rural and middle America”, it became “we need to treat drug abuse like a disease and not a crime” and “blame Big Pharma”.
As someone who stopped smoking in my twenties and has thus far refrained from Whatsapp/Facebook and does not watch superpower movies, really, I don't see why people cannot make the choice.
As a collective population, some percentage is in fact expected to make the choice. But why do you explicitly imply that they don't have a choice? Honestly interested, not trolling.
>But why do you explicitly imply that they don't have a choice?
I'm not. I believe people have free will and are not automatons. There is always a choice.
However, it is disingenuous to expect or demand most or many people to make "the right" choice, whatever that might be. Our choices are our own but they are, sometimes heavily, influenced by many things. There is a whole industry called advertising dedicated to just that. I've heard some tech companies are big on that.
Humans are not pure intellect, a brain wrapped in tin navigating through space always running an algorithm to decide the most optimal next step. Try to think why people smoke or took opium or overdose on whatever. Do it as an empathy exercise.
Sorry if I sound grumpy. No intention to be rude, honestly. Hn just sounds so inhuman sometimes.
It's also their responsibility not to lie to the public just to create demand for their products. A doctor would not get away with these bullshit recommendations, why can these advertisers get away with it?
I've heard there's this new industry called advertising that is focused in swaying people in a certain direction. There's also this new contraption called mass media. Also there's this thing called wealth accumulation. It sure seems like putting those three together might kind of, sort of influence a large mass of people into doing certain things.
Because they're straight up lying when they say it's better than breast feeding. Encouraging mothers to breast feed is hard enough as it is, we really don't need some idiotic company spending millions in deceptive marketing designed to get them to stop lactating and become dependent on their products. This caliber of sociopathy is unacceptable no matter how they spin it.
Probably the vast misinformation campaign explicitly targeting vulnerable and undereducated people claiming that Nestle formula was superior to breast milk and would give their children a better shot at success in life.
I can't stop thinking about this because on surface it sounds reasonable, but there's something off about the logic.
So don't offer aid because it will stop capital investment. But there is no capital to invest because people spend their days trying to stay alive rather than obtaining capital.
So the logic is flawed. You want to promote investment in a place with nothing to invest by not investing in that place.
But furthermore, you want to do it in the name of fairness. You want to give Africa the same market opportunity that exists in America. That logic is also flawed, because there is no opportunity in Africa. So you're just letting companies with preexisting status hoarde all the opportunity.
There is a huge difference between investing in the productive capacity of a country, and dumping cheap/free goods.
If you look at countries that have successfully transitioned from 2nd/3rd world countries to 1st world economies, despite what "free market" boosters would have you think, nearly all of the started out with a huge amount of protectionism, so that domestic producers could improve their capacity without getting decimated by (initially) more advanced foreign competitors. South Korea is a great example of this, and of course China - while China is famous for its exports, China makes it notoriously difficult for foreign firms to compete in the country, often putting out the tantalizing notion of a huge market, but then stealing trade secrets and putting their thumb heavily on the scale in favor of domestic companies.
You can offer aid/investment in a different way that builds up local capacity instead of dependence. Which isn't always easy or straightforward, but the first step is the intention.
It will often be less beneficial for the fortunes of the "developed world" based institutions behind the philanthropy though, which is why the unconsidered default is often in the other direction (even without actual malicious intent which sometimes exists too), and it takes extra intention and commitment and willingness to sacrifice some self-interest.
Very, very slowly. The Little Divergence, where Western Europe started to grow faster than any region had ever done before in a sustained way, started in the 1300s. It was the 1800s before the Great Divergence[1] happened and it became obvious that the West was doing something new in human history, sustained economic growth large enough to outpace population growth, that could be sustained.
Europe generated the capital to invest very, very slowly. The joy of foreign direct investment is in but having to spend centuries saving up.
[1] ACCOUNTING FOR THE GREAT DIVERGENCE
Stephen Broadberry
It's easy when you're the first one in a non-globalized world where you literally create the capital by yourself, for yourself, and then spend it on yourself.
But trying to start an economy in Africa while competing with the pre-existing economy of the rest of the world... How is that the same thing?
* The recycled soap is resold in US as a charitable item
* Profits from recycled soap sales are used to help fund/grow 3rd world soap manufacturers, or to help them lower the cost to make it, or subsidise the cost to more available to citizens of their country
I see your point and, I know it seems a little roundabout, but could this solve the issue?
On the other side of the coin then you would have African STEM working on trying to find enough recycled soap. That would probably be problematic because the ratio of supply from hospitality can't touch the backlog of demand caused by poverty. So you provide them the soap and that's one less obstacle standing in their way as they tackle more actionable problems.
The worst is that a country like China does regular business with them (for better or for worse) and we (US) criticize them for political reasons with no regard to whether it's good for Africa or not, just whether it's good for us (politically that is—to criticize Chinese influence/power).
I think it's more complicated than that: a country can't become self-sufficient in the long term if the majority of its population either flees or starves to death in the aftermath of an ecological disaster. You need foreign food and medical aid in that sort of situation, because your domestic capacity can't possibly grow to fit the needs.
Similarly for little things like soap: they're essential for basic health, but economically they fall into the "discretionary purchases" bucket. If the people being supplied by this nonprofit don't have the discretionary income to purchase locally-manufactured soap in the first place, then you're not curtailing any amount of domestic industry by providing it to them for free. Counterintuitively, you're promoting long-term domestic economic security by ensuring that more children make it to productive adulthood.
(All of this not to say that things like clothes donation's can't hurt the recipient's economy, which they certainly can. But I don't think that cynicism is warranted in this case.)
Yeah, it would be better if instead the first world countries stopped destabilising governments and stealing natural resources in the third world. They might have a decent chance at developing independently then.
Indeed. It is wildly counterproductive over the long term. The things we dump on them are largely things they’re well able to make for themselves. If we wanted to dump stuff that would have real, long term impacts we’d be sending cutting edge technology or capital goods that enable more development, like solar panels or biogas setups. Shipping free, cheap commodity products that they could just as easily have jobs making themselves just means fewer jobs producing those commodities.
While the base (ash in this case) can be locally produced, africa as a continent isn't a big edible oil producer/exporter, and that's usually the expensive part in soapmaking.
And one could argue that plant ash isn't the most sustainable source of base in making soap.
> There's really no reason US recycled soap needs to be the soap that is sent to (eg) Africa, shipped over oceans. Doesn't (eg) Africa have it's own soap production facilities?
The article mentions several target areas that are under civil war and natural catastrophe conditions, where soap production might be collapsed. Syria, for example, was renowned for their Aleppo soap, whose recipe was allegedly over a thousand years old, and whose original production facilities were in one of the most embattled locations in fights between Western Forces and the so-called Islamic State (Syrian refugees have started making that soap again in their exile, mostly in Turkey). I'd wager soap production in Haiti also was impacted.
I once was in the "don't send them goods, send them money so they can buy local goods and help their economy" camp. Then I experienced the high levels of corruption in these countries, and how money easily disappeared. It's hard and unprofitable to make a truckload of soap disappear, unless the local warlord has some kind of soapy-water fetish.
I picked up on the 60% reduction point too. He got the idea in 2008 and looking at the chart you see the trend is constant over the last 30 years, so we can’t see any impact from their work in the plot. That’s not to say they haven’t helped to improve hygiene, but maybe hygiene would have been improved by other means (local soap, other NGOs, general sanitation)
> Still, even the 60% reduction in such deaths over 20 years alone is pretty great and I hadn't known about it!
If you're interested about lots more statistics about how things have majorly improved in fairly recent history in lots of areas, albeit with lots of caveats about how there's certainly still more work to do, I can highly recommend Hans Rosling's book Factfulness.
Those tiny hotel soaps are just the peak of the iceberg.
My SO used to work seasonally in a hostel in Venice. People leave a lot of half-used shower gel bottles, soaps, makeup products etc.
It got to a point where the staff just put all the products which were safe to use(laundry detergent, shower gels, spray deodorant, shaving foam) in an unoccupied room referred to as "the Rossmann" (popular drugstore chain in some European countries) from which everyone in the know was at liberty to take as much as they wished.
A fraction of the goods were originally found unopened.
I used to travel every week for work. I became obvious that hotels should just use liquid soap instead of bars. Many indeed do this now, including large refillable dispensers for shampoo, conditioner and body wash/gel. With the amount saved, we can probably provide lots of the same to poor countries too.
Minimum wage hospitality workers appreciate your contribution.
Considering that due to a loophole(qualifying work spanning less than three months as a "business trip") they were paid the Polish, not Italian minimum wage, those €2 worth of shower gel went a long way.
This is a poor use of resources. Sending anything but money to places in need is just wasteful. This soap effort is not efficient. The expense of collecting the soap, refining it in a garage (including cost of the equipment), and delivering it to the recipients is almost certainly vastly more than if they'd just sent cash and bought brand new soap local to the recipients. And that's not even factoring in the labor of the people doing it. This is another feel-good measure that is economically stupid, and whose primary purpose is to make the volunteers feel good about themselves. That's fine, if that's what they want to do with their time and money. But no one should help them by donating. It's far better to donate your cash to people that make efficient use of it.
> whose primary purpose is to make the volunteers feel good about themselves.
Or to give jobs to people employed by the organization doing all this. :(
I'm not saying that's the conscious goal of the organizers or staff, who I'm sure are well-intentioned. But if you were an imaginary "alien anthropologist" looking at the actual outcomes of so much "philanthropy" in our world and assuming that the outcomes represent the purpose, i think you might determine that the main point of it all is to provide professional jobs to people in already relatively wealthy communities. :(
You’re missing the whole environmental concern. All this soap gets discarded into a landfill. Not all of the thousands of different hotel bar soap brands are biodegradable. Certainly not the ones with plastic packaging.
What does packaging have to do with it? The unopened bars are simply left for the next guest. The packaging from the opened ones is already headed to the landfill. This doesn't change that equation at all. The reduction of soap bars headed to the landfill is infinitesimally small, and there's an environmental cost to their inefficient small-scale facility and inefficient delivery mechanism to ship their product to end users. It may be that there's a tiny little net positive environmental effect, but I seriously doubt it. And environmental benefits are an after-the-fact justification, not one of the primary motivators.
This is feel-good whitewashing. There are better things to do. Stop the waste at the source with refillable dispensers. Mandate better packaging or eliminate the packaging entirely.
The problem with things like this is that they make people feel better, make it seem as though something is being done, but don't actually do anything good, and for the cost, are worse than the alternatives. Manufacturers don't have to change packaging and hotels don't have to reduce waste, because for pennies on the dollar, they can point at a program like this, get a PR win, and claim they're doing something. It's not a viable business model, it's not in the best interest of those who ultimately benefit, but it makes "us" feel better and it makes the hotels look better.
>"Seipler did some back-of-the-napkin math and realized that millions of bars of perfectly salvageable soap were going to waste.".
>"Its biggest partner, Hilton, which signed on all of its worldwide locations in 2019, has contributed 14.5m bars of soap in less than 3 years."
>"hotels go through ~3.3m bars of soap every day."
That sounds like a primary environmental concern and a pretty large one at that.
>"Stop the waste at the source with refillable dispensers. Mandate better packaging or eliminate the packaging entirely"
The hotel industry has virtually no interest into committing to any these changes because they generate so little PR value. No one's going to Embassy Suites because they care about the environment. This solution is at the very least a passive opportunity for companies like Hilton, to reduce waste.
Commercial entities have to pay for their waste to be taken away where I am so they make at least some feeble attempts at reducing waste. Just rack up the price of landfill until no one will pay to use it or just forbid landfill for pretty much everything and you will solve that problem and generate business opportunities for new solutions.
>you will solve that problem and generate business opportunities for new solutions.
You might "solve" the problem of landfills being used, at the expense of additional resources (eg. labor, energy, capital) being devoted to doing the same stuff (ie. getting rid of waste). I'm skeptical the trade-off is worth it, considering that soap isn't super toxic, landfills are lined anyways, and that we're not exactly running out of landfill space any time soon.
Trash pickup is too cheap / Recycling too expensive and this is a great case;
The remainder soap creates a valuable commodity at a small cost of the original, but hotels (or their toiletry suppliers) aren't solving this on their own (a potential revenue stream).
How do we connect the dots?
I say this as US jurisdictions are cutting (resident paid) recycling programs because of the high cost of sorting plastic; while the US experiences cardboard shortages, metal shortages (as old vehicles waste yards) - in the midst of climate change pacts.
OR, as few jurisdictions implement composting programs where 40% of landfill waste is likely compostable. (and there is a market for curbside compost companies, where consumers are paying $40/mo though the output is very valuable)
Recycling was a scam invented to pretend plastic is acceptable.
We should straight up give up on much of recycling and go back to focusing on the recycling that matters and is worthwhile, and begin to heap scorn on plastics the same way we have done on styrofoam (remember when every big Mac came in it’s own styrofoam container?).
Styrofoam almost perfectly demonstrates the issues of recyclability and suitability for food containers that also apply to plastics in general:
(Note that what we generically call styrofoam is expanded polystyrene (XPS), which isn't quite the same material as the original 'Styrofoam' brand of extruded polystyrene (EPS) insulation board. The commonality is the polymer they're made from, polystyrene (PS), which is also used as "normal" moulded plastic.)
Virtually no polystyrene foam is recycled (and most municipal recycling rejects PS entirely). This is because of the same economic unviability of recycling that plagues most plastics, just greatly exacerbated by the low density of foams. Similarly, the issue with Styrofoam food containers is much more immediate than microplastics in general: PS releases its toxic monomer styrene when heated, which just about makes coffee cups and fast food containers its worst possible use case. But the low price and insulative properties of the foam render it popular still in jurisdictions where it's legal.
Also: Rigid polystyrene is used in food containers, too (e.g., yoghurt containers and disposable plastic cups). And another popular polymer, ABS, also contains styrene (hence the recommendation for ventilation when 3D printing it).
Sadly this doesn't seem stop people from jamming up our building's recycling bins with tons of the stuff. Or IKEA, Samsung, and their ilk from producing tons of it to use in product packaging. Horrible stuff!
Hopefully - I might be being a bit harsh on IKEA specifically. There's certainly a lot of "IKEA-like furniture" PS foam packaging out there that I often see overflowing the recycling.
Most of the stuff I have bought from Ikea seem to be mostly carboard packaging. Which isn't actually that horrible for recycling when it is uncontaminated like stuff used for flatpack furniture is.
Though it depends on the target. Polystyrene requires less water and energy that cardboard or injection molded plastics; and protects goods better. (Egg transportation has been studied)
On eggs: Polystyrene is also very reusable and recyclable in sorted recycling (aka taking back to the grocery store)
Plastic recycling is worse than a scam - the process actually releases more carbon (mostly co2) into the atmosphere than creating a new plastic item. I've heard that it was widely implemented to "promote awareness". And the worst part? People who drive gasoline vehicles to bring their plastic recyclables to the recycling center.
My question for plastic recycling is: if it's so difficult to recycle why not just landfill it? It can't create microplastics, harm wildlife, or float around in the ocean if it's buried inland under feet of dirt.
I mean yeah it would be much better if we didn't use it at all but I don't think that genie is going back in the bottle anytime soon.
>My question for plastic recycling is: if it's so difficult to recycle why not just landfill it?
Probably because of public unease about sustainability, specifically running out of landfills.
>GONZALEZ: There were all these stats coming out at the time that showed that the number of landfills in America was plummeting. Landfills were closing, and people kept citing these stats in stories about the garbage barge.
>KINNAMAN: And so people put it all together, and in their minds, the conclusion was that the United States is running out of landfill space. The United States was full - that we couldn't store any more.
Of course, that was never going to happen.
>And even hardcore environmentalists reluctantly agree that, yeah, we have a lot of space left. But people thought we were running out of space, and that was what mattered.
I'm right now drinking from a bottle that's been filled dozens of times. And the best feature of a reused bottle is that it has less aromatics to leach out than the newly-manufactured bottles have - they've already leached out.
Reuse is good but it's also kinda hard in two ways I've found: you will accumulate too many "reusable" plastic items (one or two coke bottles you reuse is fine, but what are you going to do with twenty?), and also some are tricky to reuse (how do I reuse my candy bar wrapper or shrink wrap my item came packaged in?)
Reuse doesn't mean it has to be you reusing the item. For example in Germany pretty much all drinks sold have a deposit you pay for the container which you can back by returning the bottle/can. It is then up to the supplier to reuse or recycle it who can be forced or incentivized by legislation to favor reuse. Glass and many plastic bottles here are built for reuse - e.g. the plastic water bottle I happen to have on my desk right now is clearly labeled MEHRWEG-LEIHFLASCHE - reusable loan bottle.
I don’t know… I think over time plastic tends to become brittle due to UV exposure, temperature cycling, degradation of plasticizers. etc. So I would expect it to release more and more microplastics.
"Bacteria inoculated onto Plastic blocks were readily recovered for minutes to hours and would multiply if held overnight. Recoveries from wooden blocks were generally less than those from plastic blocks, regardless of new or used status; differences increased with holding time."
So plastic gives you more bacteria, and plastic shavings. Stick to wood.
Note that the lignin in the wood is horrible for the cutting edge. Knives on wood need far more frequent sharpening. But in my opinion it is a good trade off.
Note to use solid wood. I've seen cutting blocks of wood strips glued together - impossible to clean and easy to warp. All the disadvantages of every type of cutting board in one overpriced scrap ))
Why do you assume plastic shavings in your food from cutting boards? I googled around about HDPE cutting boards and only dubious SEO sights mentioned plastic shavings.
You will see hoards of people loading palettes of 1cu. and 0.5L water bottles into their minivans/suvs. It is depressing a/f because my city has fantastic water.
The 1cu bottles are just an insult to everything good in this world.
I think that plastic recycling wasn't an invented scam, rather a bad generalization of previous recycling systems. Rags, metal, paper, glass can be reasonably recycled or at least processed into something else (rags into paper) and this has been done for centuries. It must have felt natural to add yet another material category to this list.
>Recycling was a scam invented to pretend plastic is acceptable.
It's only a scam because it became a thing so recently.
Recycling of glass is no more economically viable than plastic recycling and even it was a thing until we started making domestic labor and industry ludicrously expensive.
Recycling being too expensive can also be a sign that it isn't worth it.
This only works because it's subsidized from all ends: the hotels are subsidizing it to get some PR out of it, and 20k volunteers are subsidizing it with free labor (according to the article).
Soap is cheap. I can buy ~400 g of soap for a dollar, at retail prices. This covers the entire supply chain to produce it, get it to the store, and sell it to me, and the price isn't just the price, it's also a rough indicator for the effort and to some extent the environmental impact.
I wouldn't be surprised if the shipping, the production facilities, the fuel for the volunteers commuting etc. made this a net-negative (compared to throwing out the leftovers and making new soap at industrial scale) not just economically, but also for the environment.
Soap is artificially cheap too, because it's a byproduct of meat production. If I wanted to think ecologically about soap, I'd think about its source.
I use hotel soap, but would have utterly no problem bringing a tiny amount of body wash with me. I already use liquid body wash at home because I live in a region with hard water, and soap turns into soap scum.
Never thought of liquid soap as being less cleaning due to soap scum. Interesting. I used Dr Bronners Peppermint for scalp-to-toes cleansing for nearly a decade, but switched to bar soap around the start of the pandemic when I moved to somewhere where it wasn't easy to get (either in store, or stuff shipped to the house, pretty remote, snowy location without delivery access during the winter months).
I now live in a much more urban area, but am trying to reduce unnecessary plastic consumption - not to the extent of being "trash-free", but instead in the sense of trying to support alternatives, so that it becomes more standard/easy to access. There are stores with bulk dispensers of a variety of cleaning products near me. I may consider switching back for my home shower usage.
You used to be able to get bar "soap" that was based on detergent, not soap. Detergent is identified by things like sodium lauryl sulfate etc. Remember "you're not really clean until you're Zest-fully clean." because Zest was made from detergent.
Soap is listed in the ingredients as being based on tallow or lard. When my family moved to a hard-water region, I looked at ingredient labels, and discovered that you can't buy detergent based "soap" any more -- even Zest is based on soap. This could be due to a glut of those materials triggered by rising meat production.
So we switched to liquid hand and body wash, which is detergent based. It's not as luxurious as soap, but I'm the one who cleans the bathrooms, so I make the rules.
Soap scum is calcium stearate, which is not soluble in water, and remarkably difficult to remove from the inside of bathtubs and showers. And your water softener has to work remarkably well to completely eliminate soap scum.
Some people have problems with sodium lauryl sulfate. In toothpaste it gives me mouth ulcers, and in soap I get skin irritation. It’s quite hard to find SLS free toothpaste, or even shampoo, but it could be worth trying if you have unexplained skin irritation. I haven’t had one ulcer since swapping toothpaste and before that I was getting them all the time.
>Soap is artificially cheap too, because it's a byproduct of meat production
source? I know it might traditionally be made from animal fats, but the cheap soaps seem to use SLS, which wikipedia describes as "derived from palm kernel oil or coconut oil"
Look at the ingredients in a soap like ivory or zest (which used to be a detergent until 2008), or Irish spring (which I like, but is definitely a cheap soap) - the first one will be sodium palmitate or tallowate.
That's technically correct but colloquially those are interchangeable, eg. dish "soap", or liquid hand "soap".
>Look at the ingredients in a soap like ivory or zest (which used to be a detergent until 2008), or Irish spring (which I like, but is definitely a cheap soap) - the first one will be sodium palmitate or tallowate.
After checking the ingredient lists of body washes/hand soaps on amazon, this seems to be limited to solid soaps. I suppose it still means the parent post's point is true (ie. solid soaps are artificially cheaper because of animal fat), but in the context of this story it doesn't matter much. Liquid soaps are more popular than solid soaps[1], except in low income countries where they're more popular because they're cheaper[2]. In my experience liquid soaps are at least as popular as solid soaps in hotels, so it's safe to assume they're willing to fork over money for non-subsidized soap (ie. liquid soaps) and the animal subsidy isn't something that's driving hotel soap waste.
I belong to a family of chemists, and there's a general sense of resignation over the fact that terms have such disparate popular and technical definitions. Not to mention, legal ones as well.
> 86% of guests who stay at a hotel for 1-2 nights use it, handily outranking other popular offerings like the in-room TV (84%)...
This is extremely nit-picky, but I wouldn't use the word "handily" here. "Slightly" is a better word for a 2% difference. The next most popular option was at 81%.
Another nit-pick is the part where they say hotels throw away "~440B pounds of solid waste — much of it soap and bottled amenities". How much of it?
Well, if hotels go through ~3.3m bars of soap every day, and hotel soaps seem to be about .5 oz each, that's 0.03125 pounds * 3.3M * 365 = ~38M pounds a year. That's considerably less than 1% of the total waste thrown away by hotels. I would describe that as "not much of the waste thrown away by hotels".
That doesn't mean it's not a worthy cause to reduce 38 million pounds of waste a year, or to provide hygiene products to people who need them. But, they might as well not exaggerate or overstate the effect as much as they appear to be doing in this article.
Missing from this story is any evidence that the soap they're providing is actually helping. It would be nice to see some sort of RCT where free soap was compared with the benefit from selling the recycled soap and then just giving people the proceeds.
I’ve noticed an increasing number of hotels I’ve stayed at have shower pumps for soap, conditioner, and shampoo. These pumps are locked so that they cannot be easily tampered with. This solution seems much more environmentally friendly. It has the additional benefit that you needn’t worry about running out.
Yes, it reminds me of the “Americans designed a pen that can be used in space, Russians just used pencil” joke.
Even though that joke is wrong… graphite breaks off and is a fire hazard… in this case using dispensers seem to eliminate this problem and the massive apparatus used to support it.
Maybe Hilton guests just really like their bar soap? How many people don’t bring their own anyway?
I never bring my own, because there's always good soap at every hotel. I used to have a soap caddy when I was in college and it got so gross, and was occasionally lost, that I just don't want to deal with it.
I'm picky about shampoo and conditioner, so I bring my own in travel containers.
Stepping out of the house I always bring my own unscented soap. Perfume allergy is a reality for thousands of people. If I accidentally wash my hands with scented soap I got 20-30 minutes of itchy nose and wheezing before the smell wears off :/
Same here! Accidentally using most commercial restroom soap is almost an emergency for me. It’s even a problem to travel in a car with someone else who has washed their hands with it recently. If I get that type of fragrance on my hands I have to wash it off with unscented soap as soon as possible.
I remember staying at a (modest) hotel in Netherlands 20+ years ago and seeing this for the first time and thinking what a brilliantly pragmatic idea. It's amazing and sad that it didn't catch on everywhere.
I stay at a lot of hotels and I'd say it's becoming very common now days, at least in the UK and Europe. Pretty much the norm in all low-to-midrange chains, as well as many independents and even some of the more fancy chains (although I stay in those a lot less often!). There are some surprising exceptions, however: Hilton and Hilton Doubletree still do silly little plastic bottles!
It’s a status thing and it takes time for public perception to change. The hotels have been careful to explain the environmental and carbon benefits everytime they make a change like this - even ten years ago “pump soap” would be considered something you find in a large public restroom, not a fancy hotel.
Even if the hotels are using it as an excuse to save money; good on them. Senseless waste is silly.
I'm extremely allergic to seeing these "for the environment" claims, because it's usually obvious they're doing it mainly to save costs. I have no issue with them doing a sensible thing, but I consider lying rude.
Both can be true. If environmental changes are also financially beneficial, that’s the fastest way to drive change. When it’s more expensive to be eco-friendly, takes a much longer time.
You can’t get into the pump, so it’s at least impossible to pee in them. I guess you could pee on them, but it would be a pretty high shot, and honestly, why would you?
Maybe not the question but their answer is a good one. Spend all the time worrying about one attack vector when there’s dozens of other places along the supply chain where just as nasty or worse things can happen.
At the last hotel I stayed at, peeing on them would be somewhat difficult, though not impossible, especially if you have a penis. Peeing in them would be very difficult indeed as you simply cannot open the top easily.
One solution for body soap is basically a handsoap dispenser with body soap in it - you simply aren't peeing in the bag and there aren't many places to pee into.
On top of it all, someone had to show ID to get access to the hotel room, and you are can very well get charged for such things.
I had a week long business trip where I was literally only in the hotel long enough to sleep before getting up, showering, and leaving for the day, so I never used any of the hand soap. I did go through several of the travel sized shampoo and body washes they had in the shower, though.
Hotel soap is gross because hotels invariably have super-soft water. Bar soap leaves a nasty film all over one's skin. I always bring my own shampoo and soap dispenser due to this.
If I’m staying at a hotel for multiple days, I like to stop at a nearby store and get full size toiletries. (Maybe even some bubble bath or something to unwind, and some snacks to save on using the hotel market.)
I’d rather use that then try to fumble with the often tiny bottles of soap that are either hard to pry the cap open on or barely have enough soap in the bottle for a single day. Plus I can grab a cheap loofah, too.
Office restrooms have a completely different use case - they're not trying to turn over occupancy as quickly and cheaply as possible. And none of the office restrooms I've been in have ever used bar soap. And I have input into my office building's selection - I get to complain to the office manager who can then complain to the building management. The result is, typically, some hypoallergenic liquid or foam that doesn't over-dry most people's skin, so they have little reason to bring their own.
I've considered it. Most office soap smells so bad. With the exception of Microsoft's soap. It's been close to ten years since I worked there, but I can still remember how good their hand soap smelled.
You stayed 50 times in hotels in 1 year and you think the new soaps are the problem. That is funny. Compare your own carbon footprint to a person from 3rd world country if you want to talk about ridiculous.
I wouldn't be surprised if most of those 14% of people who don't use hotel soap for washing their hands are people who don't wash their hands anywhere else either.
I bring my own soap for the shower, as the one provided by hotels often doesn't really clean well, neither smells really good. It does double-duty as soap for the hands, since it's higher quality than whatever most hotels have.
If you have a suit or dress, the closet is a requirement to hang clothes so they aren’t folded and get wrinkles. Also, the iron is nice for a crisp shirt and slacks.
This is an ad for a startup, what really happens to used hotel soap is it goes into a landfill (which isn't surprising). A startup is trying to recycle it.
While it is an "ad", I don't think it's fair to call it a startup since their work has already become established, and they've been running since 2009, for example they say they produced 68 million bars of soap.
No, you are not the only ones. When we are on a multiple destination trip (our standard way of travelling), I take the opened soap to the next accomodation(s) and use it before opening any new ones.
"Reduce, Reuse, Recycle" -- in the order of priority. Why select Recycle when alternatives are simple and viable?
As the largest hotel soap recycler in the world, Clean the World has helped lead to a 60%+ reduction in the number of children who die from diarrheal diseases each year.
Wow, casually overclaiming their ~0% impact. No doubt these folks are getting all the grants and we are discussing them here.
>That means that, in normal times, hotels go through ~3.3m bars of soap every day.
...
>Every year, it has been estimated that the hospitality industry generates ~440B pounds of solid waste — much of it soap and bottled amenities.
Innumeracy.
Based on these numbers, and assuming a bar of hotel soap is 2 ounces, that means that bars of soap are 3.3 * 365 / 1000 (millions in a billion) / 8 / 440 or about 0.03 percent of the solid waste generated by hotels. "Much of it" indeed.
So 4 people doing all the work by hand could do 500 bars a day. But now it takes 20,000 volunteers and they've made 68,000,000 bars, so only about 6 days worth of work per volunteer total?
Most volunteers are probably doing an hour or two at a time, and probably slower/worse than this guy's four close friends that were grinding through it. I would think some volunteers are doing other stuff as well.
The volunteers are usually half day corporate team building events. The company pays a fee and the staff provide "voluntary service", photos are then taken and shared on social media.
This article ends with what seems one of the worst cases of green washings I have seen in a long time.
"Diversey, a leading provider of hotel hygiene products, has repurposed 25m bars of soap since 2013"
The article claims that in a single day 3.3 million bars of soap are partially used in the US. So in nearly 10 years Diversey has repurposed the equivalent of roughly one week. I don't want to bash Diversey, if they are a startup or small company I would find this a great achievement. But if they are a major player, lets say with a market cap of 20%, the sold 2.4 billion bars of soap in the same time.
I started doing the same after seeing room keepers just throw them to the trash back in 2019.
They lasts way longer than I expected - I haven’t bought any soap for over 2 years despite my travel is very limited(due to the pandemic), but I still have some remaining.
Pandemic is over and traveling is starting again, I guess I’ll never able to use up all of them.
On a related note - used hotel towels and washcloths seem to end up in jails. I saw various brands products, sometimes in good condition, sometimes worn to threads, handed out for use by the detainees when I was inside.
I think this is such a clever use of capitalism for positive purpose. I’ve worked with Eco-Soap Bank (https://ecosoapbank.org/) mentioned in the article. So great.
Soap is so cheap it's not about people needing donations, it's about people needing training in using it... and clean water.
But that's HN it's all about feeling good about using the word recycling. Soap is not even a landfill issue. It just degrades to nothing. But we better burn fuel so we get to say recycling.
What a strange, backward take-away. This 84% will include people who watch 15 minutes of TV before going to bed, or people who put on the news while they're getting ready in the morning. Not sure why you would take it to assume people are watching 12 hours of TV on vacation.
There's really no reason US recycled soap needs to be the soap that is sent to (eg) Africa, shipped over oceans. Doesn't (eg) Africa have it's own soap production facilities? But I guess American consumers would be unwilling to use recycled soap? Or just the neat connection between the soap collected in one place and delivered to those poor unfortunates overseas is what's necessary to get funding and other support? Nobody wants to fund just paying for soap in (say) Africa or just recycling soap in the US, I guess.
Causing "60%+ reduction in the number of children who die from diarrheal diseases each year" -- is a pretty stunning claim. Looking closer... I guess they're simply saying that children ding of such diseases had dropped by 60% from 1990 to 2020, not that they alone are responsible for that? Just that they've "helped" to some unknown extent? I bet most readers didn't catch that. That seems a bit dishonest actually. Still, even the 60% reduction in such deaths over 20 years alone is pretty great and I hadn't known about it! (I believe this is one of the leading causes of death in man parts of the world -- or used to be?). I suspect this particular effort had a pretty minimal contribution to those numbers.