As an Airbnb host, we debate, long and hard, about how to offer guests toiletries—things like shampoo, conditioner, and soap.
For the first year, we went through our stash of hotel toiletries, the ones we had snaffoodled during various trips. Little bottles of shampoo and conditioner… sometimes body wash. Sometimes matching, sometimes not. We also had little individually wrapped bars of soap, also from hotels. Then a friend of ours, who also runs an Airbnb, gave us a big stash of small soap bars she had bought from a hotel supply place. That works!
Except… it doesn’t.
Little plastic bottles of shampoo and conditioner end up in the garbage. And the bars of soap? Guests would unwrap them, use them once or twice, and then check out. And we were left with a small bar of soap that still had plenty of use in it—but we weren’t going to offer it to the next guest (ick), nor were we going to use it ourselves.
What to do? Well, when you’re cleaning a suite and facing a deadline, you take the easy way out. They ended up in the trash as well. Ouch.
We’ve faced the dilemma from the other side, too, when we’ve stayed at Airbnbs and hotels. At one Airbnb, there was a lovely bar of Oil of Olay soap in a box on the soap dish. I had brought my own soap, so I used that. But on the last day, my niece opened up the bar of soap. Now what?
Well, I did what any considerate guest would do—I took the bar of used soap with me. It was a full-size bar, and I just couldn’t face the idea of it ending up in the trash. So now it rides around with me in the soap container in my bathroom bag when I go on trips.
All of this got me wondering. It’s one thing with an Airbnb, where the host deals with a bar of soap and little bottles every few days, but what happens at hotels? Who are dealing with dozens (hundreds?) of rooms, day after day after day? What happens to all those little half-used bars of soap and containers of shampoo and conditioner? Do they end up in the trash?
Maybe. Or maybe not.
I came across a soap recycling organization. It’s called Clean the World, and many hotel chains partner with it. Little soap bars and plastic toiletry bottles get collected and sent to a processing centre. The soap is sorted, ground into pellets or noodles, sterilized, sent to a lab for testing, and pressed into new soap bars. These bars are hygienic and safe to use and are distributed to developing countries or homeless shelters.
The plastic toiletry bottles are recycled into flakes that are then used to manufacture new products. Not quite as glamorous as the recycled soap bars, but… every little bit helps.
As an Airbnb host, we don’t have those economies of scale. Hotels go through millions of bars of soap every day. So what can we do?
We switched from little toiletry bottles to regular shampoo and conditioner dispensers. They last for months and, when they eventually wear out, can go into our municipal recycling program. As for soap, we switched to liquid hand soap for the kitchen and bathroom sinks. In the shower, guests can use a large pump dispenser of body wash. There’s still a soap dish in the shower if they want to bring their own bar.
It’s not perfect, but it feels like a better balance.
Further Reading
Clean the World's website page
YouTube video outlining the soap recycling process
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