As head of the global sales team for a technology company and a frequent traveller, most nights of the week Shawn Seipler stayed in hotels. One of those stays changed Shawn’s life forever.
“Sitting in my hotel one night, I wondered what happened to the used soap and the little half-empty bottles of shampoo. So I called the front desk and asked what happened with these items and they said they were thrown away,” recalled Shawn of that fateful moment.
From his entrepreneurial viewpoint Shawn says he “did some quick research and figured out that hotels were probably throwing away a million bars of soap every day across the United States and several million bars across the globe.”
The real “eureka moment” came when Shawn found out “there were 9,000 children under the age of five dying every single day due to hygiene related illnesses like pneumonia and diarrheal disease.” Studies showed that if these children we were given soap and they were taught basic hygiene, his idea could cut those deaths in half. “We decided there and then we were going to solve that problem and we launched Clean the World,” Shawn stated.
Clean the World works with hotels all over the world to collect their used soap and shampoo bottles, which are recycled into soap and sent to children and families worldwide.
From its headquarters in Orlando, Florida, and with operations and recycling centers in North America, Asia, Europe, and the Caribbean, Clean the World works with hotels, airlines and event businesses to collect and recycle used soap and plastic. It has delivered millions of bars of soap and hygiene products to 127 countries worldwide and diverted more than 20 million pounds of hotel waste from landfills.
The main goal for Shawn was to prevent the millions of deaths caused by hygiene-related illnesses each year and cut down on the plastic waste polluting the planet. Shawn said he “looked at this problem as an unfair and unjust situation, and felt it was my obligation, given the values my parents instilled in me, to find a solution. People’s lives were at risk. I knew I had to figure this out as an entrepreneur. I was going to go figure out how to get the soap out of the landfill, recycle it and send to those in need” Shawn said with great conviction.
Shawn also confided some very humbling moments from his global work. “I remember being in in Honduras and we were handing out soap to mothers in a local village. I was surprised how joyful these mothers were and telling me ‘We're praying for you. We're praying for you’. I was so touched by the grace of someone who is just living in abject poverty to be so happy and joyful for a bar of soap and say they were praying for me. One women said we're praying for you so you can keep bringing soap to other people around the world and not just for me and my community. That just lit a fire in me do this more and more.”
Shawn attributes the success of Clean the World to the quality and dedication of the companies that support them and people they have hired. Clean the World focuses on working with “people who have a true commitment to the value of helping others” as well as people who have a keen business acumen and expertise.
In regard to skills and talent, Shawn is focused on having “people who are smarter and brighter than us, with more innovative impulses, more expertise than we have today and are not afraid to figure out how to harness that drive to really solve problems like this.”
He also believes that Clean the World is “a sustainable business model that does not have a traditional return on investment like a technology company, manufacturer or service provider. The ROI is in the lives saved and in the landfill diversion” says Shawn.
The United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals help provide Shawn and his team with an important roadmap to promote sustainable, global enterprises like Clean the World. “The SDGs give guidance which I see as an instruction manual on what you can do to help others” Shawn says.
But when COVID-19 hit, it was a unique shock to the system for Clean the World. “We’ve always talked about the importance of hand washing and what that means to people’s health, and now every government, corporation and health organization is saying it” stated Shawn. But Clean the World’s primary revenue source, the hotel industry, cruise lines and the events and convention businesses were all shut down by the pandemic which put serious constraints on their operations.
“We pivoted” says Shawn in response to this challenge. The company developed a new product, creating build-your-own hygiene kits which can be distributed to those still in isolation and help local communities during the pandemic. “We are going to figure out how to come out of this with something that is going to help other people. And we are going to fulfil what our organization and our social entrepreneurial vision is all about.”
The focus on serving communities is at the heart of Clean the World’s mission. Shawn hopes more people will think about their own role in the global community. “Something that is built on the premise of saving lives and protecting the environment is wealth, it is value” he says. “It’s not about the wealth you accumulate. It is the impact you have in helping people.”
