Improve Your English with This Incredible Soap Recycling Story Ep 794
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Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile. I don't know if you knew this, but anyone can get the same premium wireless for $15 a month plan that I've been enjoying. It's not just for celebrities, so do like I did and have one of your assistant's assistants switch you to Mint Mobile today. I'm

I'm told it's super easy to do at mintmobile.com slash switch. Upfront payment of $45 for three-month plan equivalent to $15 per month required. Intro rate first three months only, then full price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra. See full terms at mintmobile.com. Hi there and welcome to this podcast from Adept English. Do you like soap? This is my favorite bar of soap at the moment.

And more to the point for this article, do you like hotel soap? Today, let's cover a positive news story.

Something good that's happening in the world. I don't know about your country, but in the UK at the moment, there are so many negative things happening. It doesn't give a good feeling for 2025. Our economy isn't doing well. People are fed up with politics. The weather is gloomy. It's much harder to get a job.

The price of everything seems high. And I find I don't understand many of the decisions which our leaders make. So if your country is anything like the UK at the moment, you may really enjoy a positive story, something good happening in the world. I read this story in Hustle magazine.

and I like it for two reasons. Firstly, it's about rich parts of the world helping poorer parts of the world. And secondly, it's about one man's business ingenuity, his cleverness, in other words.

His cleverness, which has helped him achieve something truly remarkable. Listen on for vocabulary about soap, hotels, business ideas, and actually something truly heroic, all while doing your English language practice. How good is that?

Hello, I'm Hilary and you're listening to Adept English. We will help you to speak English fluently. All you have to do is listen. So start listening now and find out how it works. So have you ever stayed in a hotel that's part of a chain?

I'm talking about nice hotels here, like Four Seasons, Hyatt, Marriott, Intercontinental or Hilton Hotels. I have stayed in them before, years ago when I travelled with my job, but I've been self-employed for years.

I work for myself, so no business trips and I can't afford to stay in nice hotels. But I know that part of the pleasure of these nice hotels is having a lovely bath or shower and using the free toiletries. By that word toiletries, I mean the free shampoo.

Soap, bubble bath or shower gel. In most nice hotels, these smell lovely. I've tried on occasion to track down where hotels get their soap from, but I've been unsuccessful. I do like nice soap.

and I always have some in use. But I'm sure you'll agree that nice soap is one of the lovely things about staying in a good hotel. But one man in the US, Sean Sipler, used to be someone typical of the person who travels a lot for work and stays in a lot of hotels.

It's not so much fun when you have to do it all the time. But Sean Sipler has been on a bit of a campaign and has changed the world. And it's all to do with hotel soap. I'll say more in a minute.

First of all, thank you to those of you who have signed up for the Adept English paid subscription service. It's a sure way to improve your English. You get a lot of content and it's a whole other world of Adept English. Don't miss out. If you want to give your English language learning a huge boost, our subscription service will take you to a whole new level and the

cost per month is tiny. You know that it would do your English a world of good. So why not join our paid subscription service in 2025?

Go to our website, adeptenglish.com to find out more. So back to the hotel soap, Sean Sipler used to stay in many hotels in America for his job. And like many business people on their own in hotels of an evening, he was probably a bit bored and started to notice things about the hotel and asked questions. In

In particular, he asked what happens to all that half used soap in hotels? Now, if you're like me and you like soap, if you stay in a nice hotel, you probably take the soap home with you. And for me, if there are any spare bars of soap knocking around, I'll take those too. Sorry, I just love soap.

Some people prefer to use their own soap, so they just leave the hotel soap in its wrapper, which is fine. It can be used for the next guests. But what most people do is use the hotel soap once or twice and then leave it behind in the room.

So when Sean Sipler asked hotel staff, what do you do with all the half-used bars of soap from the hotel rooms? He was told repeatedly, we throw it away. They bin it, in other words. Now, some statistics from the article in Hustle. Apparently, 86% of us use the soap in the hotel bathroom.

But unlike me, most people don't take it home. And Sean Sipler, the businessman traveller in the US, noticed this. And given what he'd learned from hotel staff, he started to make

calculations. He started to do the maths. He worked out if most hotel guests leave the soap behind in their rooms when they've used it just a couple of times and the hotels throw

throw it away, how much soap is that? He calculated that with around 5 million hotel rooms in the US alone and with an occupancy rate of 66%, that means the hotel rooms are occupied 66% of the time, that meant that around 3.3 million

half-used bars of soap were being thrown away every day. And really, that's just an example of the waste, which is an accepted part of life in the rich countries of the world. But Sean Sipler also did some other research. This was back in 2008. He found that in the poorer parts of the world,

9,000 children under the age of five were dying every day from hygiene-related illnesses. Just having soap and water could make such a difference. And there were studies which showed that regular hand washing could reduce those deaths by half. When we look back at the COVID pandemic,

It's clear that one of the most effective measures against the spread of COVID was simple hand washing. So Sean Sipler started to collect hotel soap. He asked some of the big chain hotels like Holiday Inn, could they

collect the used soap and give it to him. And they did. So Sean Sipler started with his friends in 2008, a business that took half used hotel soap bars.

cleaned them, melted them down and made new bars of soap, recycled soap, if you like. Now, if you're thinking, I'm not sure I'd like to use someone else's soap. Initially, they used potato peelers to remove the surface of the soap.

before they recycled it. And the melting down process will effectively have cleaned it. Soon, Sean Sipler and his friends were making 500 bars of soap per day. All he needed now was help in growing his operation and help getting the soap to the areas of the world where it was needed. He had

to the Bill Gates Foundation for funding. That was a no. And in fact, Sean Sipler applied for all sorts of grants and funds to get his idea off the ground. No one was interested. But Sean Sipler wasn't a businessman for nothing. He called his new venture Clean the World because that was its purpose. And he came up with an ingenious plan

a clever business idea to make sure it worked. He would charge hotels a small fee to belong to his soap recycling scheme and hotels could tell their customers they were doing this. The fee started at 50 cents to $1 per hotel, per room, per month. It helped hotels meet their green targets

Their obligations to be sustainable, in other words, which, of course, hotels struggle to do. It looked good to customers. It didn't cost the hotels very much. The soap could be put to good use and it didn't go into landfill. It didn't end up in rubbish dump.

And this business model was hugely successful. Now in 2025, Clean the World partners with over 8,000 hotels across the world, receiving used soap from 1.4 million hotel rooms.

So far, 68 million bars of soap have been distributed to 127 countries. The operation is now much bigger and, of course, much more professional than when the group first started out.

Clean the World has operations recycling the soap in Orlando, Las Vegas, Hong Kong, the Dominican Republic, Montreal and Amsterdam. Clean the World sends the new soap to organisations like UNICEF, the United Nations High Commission for Refugees,

World Vision and Children International, in other words, the organisations who know best which areas of the world most need soap, Clean the World provided soap to Syrian and Somalian refugees and to Haiti after the 2010 earthquake. And much of the soap has gone to countries like the Philippines,

Zambia and Honduras. Clean the World faced a crisis during the COVID pandemic. Hotels closed and the supply of used hotel soap just stopped. But Sean Sipler, again ingenious to the last, thought up another scheme to ensure that Clean the World could

could survive and operate once again once the pandemic was over. He started to supply kits, that's K-I-T, and it means specially designed equipment in a pack. That's a kit. He supplied kits to US residents so that they could save and give their unused soap and other leftover toiletries to the scheme. And these went to homeless shelters and similar organisations and

And this ensured that the operation survived. Once the pandemic was over, hotels opened again and soap could be collected and reused again. To date, it's estimated that there are 60% fewer children dying from simple diseases like diarrhoea. One's

where hand washing can really make a difference, can be life-saving. And much of this is down to the influence of Clean the World. There are other operations, other companies now doing a similar thing. For example, EcoSoap and Diversi. But Clean the World was the first. There's still more to do. It's estimated...

that there are still 3 billion people worldwide who don't have access to simple hand washing with soap to reduce disease. But what a fantastic story. I wish there were more people like Sean Sipler in the world.

with the want to do good and the business brain to accomplish it. Let us know what you think of this story. I think it's a great one to start 2025. Enough for now. Have a lovely day. Speak to you again soon. Goodbye. Thank you so much for listening. Please help me tell others about this podcast by reviewing or rating it. And please share it on social media.

You can find more listening lessons and a free English course at adeptenglish.com.