Would you use, used hotel soap? Most people wouldn't, which is why hundreds of tonnes of the stuff goes in the bin, every day, despite it being barely touched. But in Melbourne, a small factory is collecting and treating used hotel soap bars and giving it a fresh life.
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00:00 It's a bit of a grind, but this mush is making a difference.
00:06 It really is changing their lives.
00:08 About a third of the world's population don't have access to suitable sanitation.
00:12 Globally, every day millions of bars of barely used soap from hotels gets binned.
00:17 For Mike Matulak, who's been in the hotel supplier business for 20 years, it's a stain.
00:22 So a decade ago, he founded SoapAid.
00:24 I really felt compelled that I was part of the problem.
00:27 The charity takes hard bars from hotels that normally go to landfill.
00:32 It's manually, visually inspected, with the reusable soaps checked with a metal detector
00:37 and the outer layer removed by a hand scraper.
00:41 Then, it's further treated, strained and remoulded and packaged by machinery and workers from
00:48 the bridge, which helps adults with special needs find long-term employment.
00:52 The whole process itself is fairly quick.
00:54 It only takes about half an hour.
00:57 It's also cheaper than making a virgin bar.
00:59 It's about a tenth of the cost.
01:01 That means less fuel, carbon dioxide and stops about 10 tonnes of soap a year going to landfill.
01:08 The big reason Sustainability Victoria has just awarded SoapAid $250,000 to expand its
01:15 operations.
01:17 Operations that started small, but in a decade now has 250 participating hotels in Australia
01:22 and New Zealand.
01:24 And so far, 2.9 million bars of soap have been remade from scraps and distributed to
01:30 communities in need, including communities in remote and regional Australia.
01:34 Preventing children from getting sick more often.
01:36 They're able to go to school more often.
01:40 So their literacy improves, their life outcomes improve.
01:44 Communities are able to draw themselves out of poverty just purely because of the access
01:47 to something so critical to their hygiene.
01:49 [BLANK_AUDIO]