Atlanta Man Recycles Soap To Prevent Deadly Diseases Overseas

You find them in every hotel room.

Mini bars of soap. They’re used once or twice and then thrown away. The hotel industry in America throws away about 800 million bars of soap every year. That’s as much as 2.6 million bars a day.

Most of them will wind up in landfills.

But a remarkable effort is under way in metro Atlanta called the Global Soap Project – to recycle that soap to prevent deadly disease in poor parts of the world.

Derreck Kayongo loves soap. His warehouse is filled with tens of thousands of pounds donated by hotels and motels. As he showed Channel 2 Action News reporter Tom Regan one of the garbage bags full of soap, he told Regan, “This is from the Marriott Hotel in downtown Atlanta. It’s a beautiful bar of soap.”

An African refugee, Kayongo was stunned when, during a hotel stay, a maid told him the soap bar he used once had been thrown away. Kayongo told Regan, “I said, 'Do all the hotels in the U.S. do this?' And they said ‘Yeah, it’s part of the etiquette.’ And that’s what got me starting to think about getting those bars and recycling them.”

WEB EXTRA: Global Soap Project

Kayongo showed Regan how the soap is sanitized and re-purposed, ground into flakes, melted in superheat and reshaped into new bars that are cut to hand-size. He showed Regan some of the finished soap.

“We have whites, browns, greens. We have cream. These are all high-end soaps,” Kayongo said.

The volunteers at the Global soap Project can crank out 8,000 bars of soap on a typical Saturday. One batch will soon be shipped to Ghana and arrive before Christmas.

The Global Soap Project has sent tens of thousands of soap bars to refugee camps, impoverished villages, Haiti and other places where soap is rare and deadly infectious disease is common. Kayongo said, “It’s is a life-saver. It is the first line of defense against disease.”

While Regan was there, a couple from Minneapolis showed up and delivered 7,000 pounds of soap they had collected. The donor, Jill Peterson, told Regan, “There’s people in other countries and other areas who need it so much. It seems like a no-brainer.”

Kayongo told Regan his mission is two-fold: preventing disease and keeping soap out of landfills.

“For me, it’s an environmental issue as well as an issue for the poor,” Kayongo said.