WEST PALM BEACH, FL -- Step into any American hotel, motel, or resort bathroom and you will probably find soap.
Step down the hall and you will probably find lifesavers in the vending machine.
But have you ever heard of life-saving soap?
Hotel Biba's in West Palm Beach has it.
The Breakers in Palm Beach, Homewood Suites by Hilton in Port St. Lucie, and the Road Runner Travel Resort in Ft. Pierce do too. Hotel Biba's soap is eco-friendly, but there's nothing magical in it.
When you are finished using it though, its life lives on.
Housekeeping collects all that barely-used soap and shampoo and dumps it into their Clean the World bins.
Representatives from Clean the World then pick the used soap up and take it to the Clean the World headquarters in Orlando.
The Clean the World team sanitizes, steams, packages, and sends the soap to homeless shelters and overseas where thousands of children die from diseases stemming from poor hygiene.
"If we can stop that soap from hitting landfills, recycle it, and get it to the 9,000 children who will die today because they don't have soap, lack of hygiene, then we're gonna do what Clean the World set out to do," says co-founder Shawn Seipler.
Clean the World picks the barely-used soap bins up from Hotel Biba each week.
Members of the non-profit organization hope more hotels request their service.
"Generally we collect one bar from the shower and one bar from the sink from each guest per day. It's a lot of soap," says Hotel Biba General Manager Jennifer Reichert.
Reichert says Hotel Biba has 40 guest rooms and typically up to 160 soap bars are used each day.
The program is so new; many guests like the Mimi and Phil Stutman did not even know it was underway.
Mimi Stutman happens to be familiar with the recycling process.
"I remember that my grandmother used to do that, take the soap in the house that was leftover, then heat it and use it again," says Stutman.
This time, your hotel soap is used again by those who need it most.
The more than a million bars of soap used in hotels each day, now potentially helps save millions of lives.
"It's another thing that we waste, you know, like food... things that we can discard when other people can use it," says Phil Stutman.
