Sealed Air Corporation – a Fortune 500 company, engaged in food safety & security, facility hygiene and product protection & solutions announced that its ‘Soap For Hope initiative’ launched in India in 2016, with the aim of recycling used soap from hotels and distributing them to the poor, has made a huge impact on the lives of 15,000 people so far.
Hotel chains like Accor Group, Taj Group of hotels, Ramada, Hilton, Intercontinental, Radisson, ITC, IHG Group, Lalit and Shangri-La from across 27 countries and 62 cities and NGOs like Doctors for You, Mumbai, are involved to a great extent in this initiative. More than 4,260 tonnes of soap have been collected and 3,805 tonnes of soap have been recycled & converted into soap bars yielding to 50,745 bars of newly processed soaps.
Sealed Air’s aim is to reach a million lives by 2020. Though collection, shipment and cold-processing in a centralised plant and distributing should have costed more, Sealed Air addresses this issue by decentralising the process, involving the communities to cold-press the soap without use of water or electricity with a customised equipment that takes less than 10 minutes and distributes the soap to communities near the partner hotels. This also helps them to build income, learn and spread the importance of hygiene to others.