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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

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.

pipeline_peak 5y ago
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.
- caymanjim 5y ago
  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.
  - pipeline_peak 5y ago
    >"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.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
- kwhitefoot 5y ago
  > All this soap gets discarded into a landfill. 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.
  - gruez 5y ago
    >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.
- gruez 5y ago
  >Not all of the thousands of different hotel bar soap brands are biodegradable And? Is that supposed to be a bad thing? Are we going to be running out of landfill space any time soon?
- dataexporter 5y ago
  The solution is just to have refillable liquid dispensers at the hotels. The whole point of this is meaningless.
  - nowherebeen 5y ago
    They won't. Just like how there aren't any ketchup dispensors anymore but only packets. It's more expensive. So it's not entirely meaningless.
jrochkind1 5y ago
> 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. :(

pipeline_peak 5y ago

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.

caymanjim 5y ago
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.
- pipeline_peak 5y ago
  >"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.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
kwhitefoot 5y ago
> All this soap gets discarded into a landfill. 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.
- gruez 5y ago
  >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.
gruez 5y ago
>Not all of the thousands of different hotel bar soap brands are biodegradable And? Is that supposed to be a bad thing? Are we going to be running out of landfill space any time soon?
dataexporter 5y ago
The solution is just to have refillable liquid dispensers at the hotels. The whole point of this is meaningless.
- nowherebeen 5y ago
  They won't. Just like how there aren't any ketchup dispensors anymore but only packets. It's more expensive. So it's not entirely meaningless.

jrochkind1 5y ago

> 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. :(