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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 U

• hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
  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.
  • dotancohen 5y ago
    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.
    • alsetmusic 5y ago
      Excellent podcast ep about it here: https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236323/episode/how-nestle-starved-a-bunch-of-85687280/ https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236...
    • mayankkaizen 5y ago
      Holy shit! I didn't know about that. If true, this is pure evil. Any source for further reading? Edit - never mind. I have just gone through 2 articles and now my blood is boiling.
      • jrochkind1 5y ago
        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.
        • wahern 5y ago
          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.
          • jrochkind1 5y ago
            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.
          • 5y ago
  • zelon88 5y ago
    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.
  • zelon88 5y ago
    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.
    • jrochkind1 5y ago
      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.
    • easytiger 5y ago
      > So the logic is flawed. You want to promote investment in a place with nothing to invest by not investing in that place. Why do you think they don't have anything to invest?
      • zelon88 5y ago
        Because the concept of capital was already created elsewhere in the world and now they have to obtain something that they never had to begin with. How do you compete with something you didn't know existed until it showed up on your beaches and started stealing people?
        • easytiger 5y ago
          I'm not sure it is possible to have a more flawed understanding of capitalism or Africa than this. Have you ever even been to an African country?
  • mrmattyboy 5y ago
    So what about something like: * US charity that recycles US-hotel used soap * 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?
    • jrochkind1 5y ago
      I think it would be worth a try!
    • DocTomoe 5y ago
      Depends on whether you want the people to have soap, or their local strongman to have a soap-money-financed golden AK47.
      • mr_beans 5y ago
        If it brings the price of gold AK47s down for average Americans I’ll take option 2
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • kiliantics 5y ago
    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.
    • interpenetrate 5y ago
      Bingo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Europe_Underdeveloped_Africa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Europe_Underdeveloped_Afri...
  • chrischen 5y ago
    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).
  • woodruffw 5y ago
    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.)
  • naravara 5y ago
    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.
• budu3 5y ago
  In fact West African countries have a centuries old method of making soap from locally available material. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_black_soap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_black_soap
  • Scoundreller 5y ago
    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.
    • samatman 5y ago
      West Africa is the home of the oil palm, and doesn't need to go full Borneo to produce adequate amounts of fat for saponification.
      • Scoundreller 5y ago
        Maybe the home, but that doesn't mean productive. They're not producing enough to export, and seem to even be net importing it: https://oec.world/en/profile/hs92/palm-oil https://oec.world/en/profile/hs92/palm-oil But maybe not being well represented here indicates a healthy domestic market. (and this data can be suspect: Netherlands aren't growing any, but might do some processing of some kind or re-export) https://www.indexmundi.com/agriculture/?commodity=palm-oil https://www.indexmundi.com/agriculture/?commodity=palm-oil shows 84% of production being from Indonesia and Malaysia.
    • sangnoir 5y ago
      Why would you consider exports a useful metric here? Soap can be manufactured with oil for domestic consumption.
    • wiether 5y ago
      Shea oil.
• twobitshifter 5y ago
  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)
• Vinnl 5y ago
  > 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.
• DocTomoe 5y ago
  > 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.
• eternityforest 5y ago
  I wonder if you could use Vaccum treated water as a backup if you run out of soap. There's videos of oil and water mixing in a vacuum blender, could they make a vacuum faucet that doesn't need soap? Would it remove pathogens? Maybe they could electrolize salt to hypochlorous acid the way Force of Nature does, for use if you've touched something especially filthy.