Strong, smart and funny little boy playing outdoors, wearing eyeglasses and blue plaid shirt

A nonprofit social program that takes leftover soap from hotel rooms and recycles the bars so that they can be used by children in need is coming to the United States, reports Hotel Business.

Soap Aid started by recycling waste soap from hotels in Australia who agreed to turnover these remains. Once recycled, the soap was brought into struggling communities to improve the hygiene of children.

An extension of Soap Aid's reach into North America was first discussed in 2017. Soap Aid USA was eventually started, and its new Hotel to Hands Program has registered hotels to give soap remains from 120,000 guest rooms. It's estimated that the new program will create 2.3 million new bars of soap, which will be given to 200,000 children in need for an entire year.

Recycling soap does more than help kids, says Deidre Schwartz, board director at Soap Aid USA. By recycling soap, society is able to remove a resource from the waste stream, thus lessening the amount of waste that goes to landfills.

“It just doesn’t make sense to send a valuable raw material like this to a landfill when it can be recycled and used in such a critical humanitarian way,” says Schwartz, according to Hotel Business.

For more on Soap aid, go to https://soapaid.org/home/.