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The afterlife of used hotel soap
- iso1210 5y ago> 86% of guests who stay at a hotel for 1-2 nights use it 14% of guests do not use soap? I can understand people bringing their own stuff for the shower, but 1 in 7 people bring their own soap for washing their hands?! But them I'm amazed people use TVs too. I stayed in a hotel about 50 times in the last year, I've never turned on the TV. I'm currently staying in a hotel in Paris, room service are replacing the bar of soap every day. It's ridiculous.
- nathanaldensr 5y agoHotel 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.
- mikequinlan 5y agoIf the soap is leaving a film, the water is hard not soft.
- bombcar 5y agoA crust is hard water, slipperiness you can’t get rid of is soft. https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/why-does-it-take-so-long-rinse-soap-my-hands-what-are-hard-water-and-soft-water https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/why-does-it-take-so-long-rinse-soa...
- Helitioo 5y agoI'm more surprised by how many use the closet
- unstatusthequo 5y agoIf 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.
- bombcar 5y agoI hang most everything in the bathroom so the steam from the shower helps remove wrinkles.
- kayodelycaon 5y agoI bring my own soap for hand washing because hotel soap does bad things to my skin.
- kzrdude 5y agoThe TV might be useful for Netflix. I found Netflix already logged-in by a previous guest in the hotel I last stayed in... just shows that it is used.
- 8b16380d 5y agoIt seems realistic that 14% of people would have their own soap.
- iso1210 5y agoDo 1 in 7 people use their own soap in office restrooms?
- jagged-chisel 5y agoOffice 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.
- bombcar 5y agoIn small offices if someone has a preference on soap they can usually get the office to stock theirs or at least bring it in. And based on what I’ve seen, the numbers are about right. Add in those who basically never use the hotel room but to sleep and you can get the one in seven.
- Tao331 5y agoI can't remember the last time I used an office restroom.
- tamaharbor 5y agoYour prostate (if you are a male) is apparently still the correct size.
- midasuni 5y agoI’m working on location this week, I drank about 2.5 litres of water today. If you aren’t peeing during the day you aren’t drinking enough.
- ratww 5y agoI 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.
- joshmlewis 5y agoMy wife packs our own soaps for shower but we use the hotel soap for hand washing.
- InCityDreams 5y agoI especially turn on the tv in foreign countries...gives a vibe for the place.
- dazc 5y agoUsally a shocking vibe as to how many ads people will tolerate.
- Scoundreller 5y agoProvides an interesting insight into a show’s viewership and who’s winning the auction ad budgets. This is even more fun if you can’t understand anything.
- kotaKat 5y agoIf 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.
- dazc 5y agoI 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.
- pc86 5y agoI 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.
- Symbiote 5y agoI avoid waste, so if I haven't brought my own toiletries I'll use the shower gel to wash my hands. It's essentially the same stuff.
- refactor_master 5y agoWell the TVs are for ants. At that distance my phone provides more view per distance. And Netflix.
- seaman1921 5y agoYou 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.
- candiddevmike 5y agoThis 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.
- kzrdude 5y agoWhile 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.
- gruez 5y agoAh yes, the good old submarine. http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
- smileysteve 5y agoTrash 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)
- bombcar 5y agoRecycling 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?).
- dotancohen 5y agoPlastic 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.
- PolygonSheep 5y agoMy 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.
- shannifin 5y agoI remember seeing this story on Youtube a couple years ago... https://youtu.be/49oZt8Sl-JA https://youtu.be/49oZt8Sl-JA
- rrosen326 5y agoI think this is such a clever use of capitalism for positive purpose. I’ve worked with Eco-Soap Bank (https://ecosoapbank.org/ https://ecosoapbank.org/) mentioned in the article. So great.
- cebert 5y agoI’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.
- asperous 5y agoYes, 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?
- gwbas1c 5y ago> 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.
- nicbou 5y agoI always bring my own because there's never good soap. I wear a motorcycle helmet all day for weeks, so I need The Good Shampoo.
- syshum 5y agoI just use a 3n1 product that is body wash, shampoo, and conditioner all in one... Makes like simple, keep in a 3 oz squeeze bottle for airport security theater even though i do not really fly anymore.
- gwbas1c 5y agoThat doesn't work for my hair. There's a reason most people buy separates.
- lozenge 5y agoFlagged for title
- jagged-chisel 5y agoWas the title different from the article when you flagged?
- jrochkind1 5y agoRecycling 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.
- hn_throwaway_99 5y agoI 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.
- dotancohen 5y agoThat 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.
- sp332 5y agoSo 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?
- pc86 5y agoMost 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.
- robjan 5y agoThe 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.
- aaron695 5y agoSoap costs fuck all to produce. And can be done in country furthering local industry. Less than $2 a kg - https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/new-arrival-soap-bath-skin-whitening_1665127519.html https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/new-arrival-soap-bath... 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.
- dnhz 5y ago84% of guests use the TV? I thought hotels were for visiting somewhere.
- pc86 5y agoWhat 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.
- edge17 5y agoNow do it with ketchup packets.
- Tao331 5y agoI wouldn't be surprised if restaurants found a way. I've seen folks go to great lengths to "marry" half-empty ketchup bottles.
- ck2 5y agoThe bleaching process kills every known bacteria and virus right? Because people are nasty AF, guaranteed STDs at a minimum on some of those. As long as that process can never fail, this all sounds good, just amazed the hotels actually pay for it, good on them.
- Scoundreller 5y agoThe heat required to just start the melting (~60C) will kill those. Viruses very easily before that temperature, and after a few minutes for bacteria. Fungal spores won't be killed, but that's usually less of a concern.
- air7 5y agoIt's an interesting read, but the actual answer to what is the afterlife of hotel soap is a land fill...
- Scoundreller 5y agoI’ve always taken it home. Funny since I always assumed each hotel was just melting it down and recasting them.
- yftsui 5y agoI 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.
- Tade0 5y agoThose 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.
- nicbou 5y agoI frequently contribute to the Rossman. I made it up to 4 weeks without forgetting my shampoo bottle, but that's my record.
- Tade0 5y agoMinimum 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.
- bonestamp2 5y agoI 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.
- toomuchtodo 5y agoWhy do they not do the same for the hand soap bar and eliminate the last wasteful bit entirely?
- moralestapia 5y agoHow?
- caymanjim 5y agoThis 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.
- pipeline_peak 5y agoYou’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.
- caymanjim 5y agoWhat 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.
- Jiro 5y ago>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.
- thom 5y agoAhem, are my wife and I the only ones who just keep all the toiletries from hotels and use them at home or on future holidays?
- comprev 5y agoFound Ross from Friends!
- davrosthedalek 5y agoBut the batteries!
- ck45 5y agoNo, 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.
- Gimpei 5y agoMissing 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.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- bradgranath 5y agoJesus this is gross. If you like the soap so much sell it back the hotels.
- xcambar 5y agosomehow your comment reminded me of Fight Club.
- mayankkaizen 5y agoI hate to admit that I always 'steal' those little soap. And the reason I give myself that they are going to throw it anyway so why not keep it?
- virtuabhi 5y ago"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.
- fortran77 5y agoI can't help but react with "eeew!" You never really know where that bar of soap has been, regardless of how well they "scrape" the outer surface.
- karaterobot 5y ago> 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.
- nemo44x 5y ago> This is extremely nit-picky, but I wouldn't use the word "handily" here. I think it was a pun.
- hackernewds 5y agoCould say "beat the stat by a hair's margin"
- gotaquestion 5y ago2M blue whales? Every year? That's crazy.
- kingcharles 5y agoOn 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.
- dogmatism 5y agoAll this talk about soap but none about clean water!
- eixiepia 5y agoHow can one be sure that this is proper sterilized? Mistakes can happen in the process, making this a potential source of disease. No thanks.
- TrailMixRaisin 5y agoThis 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.