Clean The World

What a great idea! Hotels donate their used bar and bottle soaps to be recycled so it can be donated to the needy around the world. They always need volunteers. We came here for a couple hours to help. They need a lot of help organizing a lot of the soap so that it can be separated from bottle (lotion, shampoo and conditioner) and the bar soap. It is a tedious process and you will get dirty. They will provide gloves to you. The soap gets recycled at the warehouse here and shipped out. Opportunity village sends a lot of volunteers here. It was pretty cool seeing the hotels that donate and the kind of soap they use. Lol I’m a dork! But it’s interesting! This place is doing great things!

This is such a great cause… diverting landfill waste and repurposing gently used soaps and amenities to prevent diseases worldwide. Over 25 million bars of soap donated to 99 countries!

Soap Saves Lives
I’ve been wanting to volunteer with this organization for a long time and fate would have it that the first Friday I’m available to do so coincides with CTW’s relief effort for Typhoon Haiyan victims. Being of Filipino descent, this cause hits especially close to home, so the timing was perfect. CTW was organizing the creation of 40,000 hygiene kits to be sent to the victims of the typhoon this past week and I’m happy that I was able to help even a little with the effort.
What is Clean the World’s mission? It’s to reduce the impact of acute respiratory infection and diarrheal disease, two fatal diseases that can be be reduced by hand washing with soap. You know those little hotel shampoos, conditioners, lotions, and bar soaps that we may use a little, a lot, or not at all? Clean the World recycles them from participating hotel partners and redistributes them domestically and internationally to those in need. With the main recycling center in Orlando, Florida, the Las Vegas warehouse is the second location that opened 1 ½ years ago with a $ 150,000 grant from Caesar’s Entertainment. The warehouse itself is full of bins of donations from the local hospitality industry, including all of the Harrah’s properties. Volunteers can work on Mondays or Fridays, but not on the weekends, which is why it took me so long to come in.
Shae, the volunteer coordinator, welcomed us, introduced the program, and showed us a short video about CTW that featured the founder who explained the mission of the organization. After that, we got to work on today’s assignment: rinsing and drying off used bottles of shampoo, conditioner, and lotion, which would then go into the hygiene kits being assembled for the P.I. There are huge boxes full of donations, so we had plenty to do in the two hours I was there.
I encourage everyone to spend some time here giving back and assist with Clean the World’s mission to prevent the spread of hygiene-​related illnesses both here and abroad. Bring a bar of soap when you come; it will help the cause!

I volunteered here during Jade’s Unilocal Helps.
I just volunteered here again on Monday with A.O.K. (Acts of Kindness LV) on Meetup and I had the same fun experience I had the first time :)
I love how much waste is saved by not only recycling of the bottles but by sanitizing the soaps and sending them to children all over the world. It saves those children’s lives because they would never have access to soap to prevent disease.
I first time I went it seemed different… but I finally realized it is because during Unilocal Helps we just stood at regular tables but this time I guess someone built sorting tables for people to stand at with is AWESOME!
I really love Shea the coordinator and I plan to go again next week to volunteer again!!!

i never even knew this place existed!
the hubby and i travel often and i’ve always wondered, «where does all this unused soap and other toiletries go after we check out?»
now i know!!!
thanks to jade’s uye for Unilocal helps month, i had the privilege of joining a handful of other Unilocalers to help ctw sort through a ton (literally) of soap, shampoo, conditioner and lotion.
clean the world collects all of the unused toiletries from hotels and manufacturers, sorts them and recycles them back into impoverished communities throughout our nation and the world.
from their website…
«Clean the World has put over 11 million soap bars and 325,000 pounds of shampoo and conditioner back into human use, simultaneously eliminating over 750 tons of waste. Through the distribution of these and other donated hygiene products to impoverished people, prevent the millions of deaths caused by hygiene-​related illnesses every day.»
i never knew that something so simple as soap could be such a life saver.
we take these things for granted when there are so many people in this world who are losing their lives simply because they didn’t have a bar of soap to clean their hands with.
the folks at clean the world clearly recognized the need and are doing amazing things through their recycling program.
if you feel the need to volunteer or are just interested in helping out in some small way, please look into sorting some soap and stuff or just make an in-​kind donation.
they can use, and most definitely appreciate, all the help they can get.

The 3 wonderfully written reviews before me pretty much sums it up, thanks Jade and David for organizing this event. I had never heard about this organization prior to Unilocal Helps, I’m glad I was able to help and definitely want to come back to sort some more. What a great way to volunteer, I’ve been spreading the word so more people are aware of this Org and hope to get more volunteers.

This organization really saves lives in a tangible cause and affect (& effect) way! Very clever too, if you read David S. & Jade W.‘s reviews, they breakdown the dual benefit of their mission: saving children who would die without access to simple hygiene and saving our landfills by recycling. The particulars involving the number of children saved from preventable illness, combined with the sheer magnitude of inventory that passes through their locations, are eye opening and inspiring.
The work itself was simple to learn: separate soap from shampoo and lotion bottles. Though we were able to sort an estimated 3.6k lbs, the warehouse is filled with boxes that need sorting. It is hot and messy work and I did let out my «I think I saw a roach scream» (I didn’t) Heavy lifting, being coated with second hand soap and splashed a bit is to be expected.
They have Americorps workers and a couple of staff here so they could really use the help. It’s not at all glamorous or high profile but hopefully Unilocalers will continue to Help @ CTW. With such a noble mission, many helping hands will make less work and it is truly satisfying to leave after a shift and realize what a significant impact your efforts made.
There are so many high profile non profits in this town, I’m so glad Jade & David arranged this effort and truly look forward to returning as many times as I can in the future.
Great group project if your company or faith based, school or other group is looking for a place to help. CTW is doing amazing things.
Thanks for being so welcoming and for the incredible work you do!

Soap.
It’s about everywhere here and so we don’t really think about what a game changer it is in terms of health.
Hand washing significantly reduces the spread of fatal diseases: acute respiratory infection and diarrheal disease. These are the top two killers of children less than 5-​years-​old in other countries, but we don’t really hear about it much. This is where CTW comes in with distributing soap and preventing more deaths. SSOO simple, so it’s crazy to me that this still happens in the world outside of ourselves.
Makes sense to have this here as we are a hospitality city and many of our strip hotels throw away hotel toiletries daily. Apparently since inception, 1.2million lbs. of this has been prevented from just going into the landfils. So it saves lives, AND is a green environmental cause too.
Our little group of Unilocal rockstars sorted soap from various hotels (mostly Vegas, but this facility receives all of the West Coast) into liquids and solid soaps. It’s pretty easy so we were able to chat while doing it but you just have to be okay with standing on your feet, lifting buckets and getting soapy (though you have gloves, and masks if you’re fragrance sensitive). We got to laugh at some of the odd things that made it into the bags — like a hotel roomservice plate, sewing kits, and lots of fake eyelashes stuck on bars of soap. Haaa.
The other CLW locations (Orlando and Toronto) are more automated with their soap making but this location is still doing a lot of things by hand so they definitely need the help! They still hand scrape the debris of the bars, hand crank to grind them, mix into sanitizing solution, bake and mold so they don’t make too much soap but sort and send a lot to the mechanized factory in Orlando until they can get their own huge setup. The two employees are really chill and nice… email them to volunteer now!
It’s a worthy cause and will definitely go on our rotation of places to help. Look for the monthly UYE volunteer series that a few of us Unilocalers are planning to commit to. This started with Unilocal Helps month, but the goodness shouldn’t end there.

Between 6 volunteers in six hours, we were able to sort through three bins of partially used toiletry for recycling. Making a small dent in the endless collection of old soap bars and bottled goods, it still felt wonderful to spend a few hours helping out an organization that is running low on volunteers. At one point Clean the World could probably get through a decent chunk of their incoming left overs. Now, it looks like two employees and a handful of volunteers.
This wonderful organization started up in Orlando and has opened up branches in Las Vegas and Toronto. Each portion of North America takes care of their coastline. Our branch does not have the machines to produce the finish product, but has many of the resources.
Volunteers come in to sort through all of the shipments and breaks it down to be reused. The soap is sterilized and ground down before it is sent to Orlando to be formed into bars. Once this process is done, CTW ships it off to countries that could use an item we take for granted. Due to their dedication, the almost 11,000,000 bars of soap they produce have lowered the child death rate in these foreign countries.
What they need more than anything is to have more people come in and dedicate a few hours to go through everything. It is a worthy cause and three hours can go a long way.