4. Used Hotel Soaps

Summary

The Economics of Everyday Things: "Used Hotel Soaps"

Host: Zachary Crockett (Freakonomics Network)
Air Date: January 12, 2026
Episode 4

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Zachary Crockett explores the journey of used hotel soaps and the surprising impact their afterlife can have globally. The show investigates what happens to those small bars of soap left behind by hotel guests, the environmental and humanitarian efforts to recycle them, and the fascinating economics and logistics behind this seemingly mundane item.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Origins of the Question: What Happens to Used Hotel Soap?

• [01:03 – 02:08]
  • Sean Seipler, a frequent traveler, wonders what happens to the soap bars he barely uses in hotels.
  • Seipler describes his frugality:

    “There's a natural, I don't want to waste things in me. And as I would use a bar of soap one time, there was always a little nag inside of me that I'm leaving it here.” (Sean Seipler, 01:40)

  • Seipler calls his hotel’s front desk and learns:

    “They said we throw it away.” (Sean Seipler, 04:38)

2. Hotel Amenities: Soap as a Staple

• [02:24 – 04:13]
  • Chai Katon Dev, professor at Cornell's Nolan School of Hotel Administration, gives history:
    • Early hotels didn’t offer soap or even private bathrooms.
    • Soap became the first true bathroom amenity as hotels modernized.
  • Soap is now the most widely used hotel amenity:

    “86% of hotel guests use those packaged soaps. They're more utilized than any other hotel room amenity, even the TV.” (Zachary Crockett, 03:16)

    • Dev adds:

      “It's a self-fulfilling prophecy... It’s there because it’s used and guests expect it.” (Chaikaton Dev, 03:54)

  • Vast quantities are needed:

    “Between 5 and 6 million hotel rooms around the world... hundreds of millions of room nights.” (Chaikaton Dev, 04:15)

3. The Launch of Clean the World

• [04:30 – 05:54]
  • Seipler begins experimenting in his garage to recycle hotel soap.
  • Early methods involved labor-intensive processes:

    “We're all sitting on upside down pickle buckets with potato peelers. We are scraping the outside of those bars of soap… grinding it through a meat grinder.” (Sean Seipler, 04:58)

  • The Holiday Inn at Orlando International Airport becomes first donor hotel.

4. Why Bother? Global Health Impact

• [08:00 – 08:29]
  • Seipler’s research reveals a crucial global need:

    “6,000 children under the age of five were dying every day from pneumonia and diarrheal disease…if you just gave them soap and taught them how and when to wash their hands, you could cut those deaths in half.” (Sean Seipler, 08:21)

• [08:29 – 08:56]
  • Despite early rejection from the Gates Foundation, Seipler pushes forward, founding Clean the World, a nonprofit to provide recycled soap to communities in need.

5. How Soap Recycling Works

• [09:09 – 11:20]
  • Room attendants collect used soap in designated bins.
  • At Clean the World, the soap undergoes industrial processing:
    • Ground into shreds and filtered to remove contaminants:

      “That filter catches all the surface material. So any plastic, hair, paper, dirt… those filters have to be changed about every 45 minutes. So it's almost like NASCAR.” (Sean Seipler, 09:27)

    • Blended with soaps of various types and moisture levels.
    • “Soap whisperer” Carlos Anderson perfects the mixture and hydration.
    • Result: Unique, marbled recycled soap bars, distributed globally (e.g., Dominican Republic, Nairobi, Uganda, Philippines, Ukraine)

6. Economic and Environmental Incentive for Hotels

• [11:20 – 12:33]
  • Funding was a major challenge – at first, there was no business model.

    “We are reducing landfill waste. We are sending soap back to countries and places where so many of the room attendants are actually from… There’s a PR value here. So what's going on inside of me is we gotta get hotels to pay for this.” (Sean Seipler, 11:42)

  • Today, U.S. hotels pay Clean the World 50-80 cents per room per month (partly offset by reduced waste disposal fees).

7. Scale and Impact

• [12:33 – 12:55]
  • Based on current operations:

    “We recycle 1.4 million hotel rooms on a daily basis. In 13 years, we have diverted 22 million pounds of waste and we have distributed 75 million donated bars of soap…” (Sean Seipler, 12:33)

8. Systemic Limits & Future Possibilities

• [12:55 – 13:27]
  • Clean the World reaches just a fraction of the total global soap waste.

    “Clean the World can't save all the soaps. They’d have to multiply their operation by a factor of about 100…” (Zachary Crockett, 12:55)

  • Dev calls for more root-level change:

    “I would like to see more efforts made at the root of the problem to give people an incentive to bring your soap with you.” (Chaikaton Dev, 13:15)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Origin Story in the Garage (Scrappy Beginnings):

  "We're all sitting on upside down pickle buckets with potato peelers. We are scraping the outside of those bars of soap."
  — Sean Seipler [04:58]

• Soap's Public Health Superpower:

  “If you just gave them soap and taught them how and when to wash their hands, you could cut those deaths in half.”
  — Sean Seipler [08:21]

• Soap Whisperer Mechanic:

  "Our soap whisperer here in Orlando is Carlos Anderson... He has to determine how much water has to get put in so that it doesn't fall apart, so it doesn't crumble, so it's not too hard, so it's not any of the things that we don't want."
  — Sean Seipler [10:28]

• Scale of Operation and Impact:

  "We have distributed 75 million donated bars of soap to children, families across the globe."
  — Sean Seipler [12:33]

• The Scale of Waste (Sobering Tally):

  “Every year, around three quarters of a billion barely used hotel soaps, maybe even yours, are headed to a landfill to join their friends.”
  — Zachary Crockett [13:27]

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Important Segment Timestamps

• [01:03] – Sean Seipler begins questioning the fate of used hotel soap
• [02:24] – History and evolution of hotel amenities
• [04:30] – Sean Seipler’s garage experiment starts Clean the World
• [08:00] – Soap recycling’s impact on child mortality globally
• [09:27] – The industrial soap recycling process explained
• [10:28] – Introduction of the soap whisperer
• [12:33] – Clean the World’s reach and impact statistics
• [13:15] – Arguments for root-level change in guest behavior

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Tone and Presentation

The episode is brisk, investigative, and filled with surprising facts, all delivered in Zachary Crockett’s signature mix of curiosity, deadpan honesty, and an eye for the quirky details of everyday economics. The guest speakers—Seipler's scrappy optimism and Dev's matter-of-fact analysis—add both warmth and rigor to the conversation.

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Summary

"Used Hotel Soaps" takes a surprisingly fascinating look at an item we barely notice but collectively waste on a massive scale. The episode traces the journey from hotel discard to life-saving hygiene tool, examines the business and logistics required to facilitate that journey, and leaves listeners considering both the promise of recycling innovation and the need to rethink everyday habits. Engaging, hopeful, and a bit sobering, it’s an intriguing peek behind the bathroom sink.

Transcript

[Sean Seipler]

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[Zachary Crockett]

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[Sean Seipler]

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[Sean Seipler]

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[Zachary Crockett]

Back in 2009, Sean Seipler asked himself a question that has occurred to pretty much everyone who's ever stayed at a hotel. At the time, Seipler was a bit of a road dog. As a tech executive in sales, he spent around half his week traveling across the U.S. minneapolis, Louisiana, St. Louis, all over. This is a guy who racked up a lot of nights in hotel rooms. And on one of those trips, something caught his attention. That little bar of soap in the hotel bathroom.

[Sean Seipler]

There's a natural. I don't want to waste things in me. And as I would use a bar of soap one time, there was always a little nag inside of me that I'm leaving it here. So in that hotel room in Minneapolis, after a couple cocktails, that nag led to asking the question. I called the front desk and asked, what happens to the soap when I'm done with it?

[Zachary Crockett]

From the Freakonomics Radio Network, this is the economics of everyday things. I'm Zachary Crockett. Today used hotel soaps. You may not think twice about those little bars they leave out for you on the sink, but a lot of thought went into putting them there.

[Chaikaton Dev]

Hotel amenities have evolved over the last 100 years.

[Zachary Crockett]

Chaikaton Dev is a professor at Cornell University's Nolan School of Hotel Administration, and he says that the earliest hotels actually didn't give you any soap. In fact, they didn't even give you your own bathroom.

[Chaikaton Dev]

It's an early 20th century innovation that hotel rooms came with a bath attached. In fact, Ellsworth Statler, the founder of the Statler hotel chain, often used to use the line a Room and a bath for a dollar and a half. So soap became the very first amenity in the bathroom.

[Zachary Crockett]

And over time, soap became a default offering in many hotels.

[Chaikaton Dev]

The one thing I've learned about the hotel business in the 43 years I've been a student of the business is there's a lot of copycat, you know, they're doing it, we better do it.

[Zachary Crockett]

These days hotels stock their bathrooms with all kinds of toiletries, mini bottles of lotion, shampoos, conditioners. Recently some big chains have replaced these single use products with refillable dispensers. But at most hotels you'll still find a bar of soap next to the sink. And there's a reason for that. They are extremely popular. In 2019, Dev Co authored a study of in room amenities and found that 86% of hotel guests use those packaged soaps. They're more utilized than any other hotel room amenity, even the tv.

[Chaikaton Dev]

It's a self fulfilling prophecy in the sense that it's used because it's there and it's there because it's used and guests expect it. It's also probably the one item that's most inconvenient to carry with you after use. So the solution was let's get the little bitty bars of soap that we could then leave in the hotel bathroom for disposal.

[Zachary Crockett]

So what does that look like? Big picture.

[Chaikaton Dev]

Let's assume There are between 5 and 6 million hotel rooms around the world and they get used at even 60% occupancy year round. You do the math, that's hundreds of millions of room nights.

[Zachary Crockett]

That's a lot of soap.

[Chaikaton Dev]

That's a lot of soap.

[Zachary Crockett]

That takes us back to Sean Seipler, the guy who made that call to his hotel front desk back in 2009. He asked what they did with all.

[Sean Seipler]

That soap and they said we throw it away.

[Zachary Crockett]

Seipler could not accept that millions of bars of soap ended up in landfills every day. So he took a bunch of these half used bars with him and he set up a mad scientist lab in his garage with the help of some family and friends.

[Sean Seipler]

We're all sitting on upside down pickle buckets with potato peelers. We are scraping the outside of those bars of soap. My cousin Noel is taking this soap and he's grinding it through a meat grinder that then gets put into the cookers. I've done the research to know that I can rebatch it and make a brand new really good bar of soap.

[Zachary Crockett]

How do you go about getting your soap in those early days, did you have a big first donor?

[Sean Seipler]

The Holiday Inn at the Orlando International Airport. I remember the general manager's name so clearly. It's Peter Favier, he said. I've often wondered what we could do with this and if there's something you can do with it. Give me anything and everything you need to collect it and we will make sure that happens on our end and we'll get it back to you. Access to soap and collecting soap was not the issue. That was very easy. It just became a matter of, you know, when we got it, what are we going to do with this recycled soap?

[Zachary Crockett]

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[Sean Seipler]

Sometimes AT&T business Wireless connecting changes everything.

[Zachary Crockett]

As Shawn Seipler was researching how to get the most out of his pile of used hotel soaps, he found himself going down a rabbit hole of scientific papers. At the time those Studies showed that around 6,000 children under the age of five were dying every day from pneumonia and diarrheal disease.

[Sean Seipler]

Every one of the studies showed that if you just gave them soap and taught them how and when to wash their hands, you could cut those deaths in half.

[Zachary Crockett]

Getting soap to all those kids would require a slightly bigger operation, and that meant funding. Seipler spent $20,000 on grant writers and lawyers and sent out an application to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. His proposal was rejected.

[Sean Seipler]

That was a devastating, very emotional moment of, what are we doing? Have I made a mistake in life?

[Zachary Crockett]

Seipler decided to forge ahead anyway. He founded Clean the World, a nonprofit that provides soap and hygiene products to communities in need around the globe. Today, it's quite an enterprise.

[Sean Seipler]

Typically, a room attendant will clean anywhere from 11 to 13 rooms a day. That bag of soap is filling up. When they get to the end of their shift, there will be a Clean the World green bin for soap. Our system will route that box into one of our centers.

[Zachary Crockett]

So how does an old bar of soap become a new bar of soap?

[Sean Seipler]

The first thing we do is we put it into a big machine that's got a big metal screw in it, just grinding that soap all the way through the very end, almost like a meat grinder. There's a very, very fine filter. That filter catches all the surface material. So any plastic, hair, paper, dirt. That metal screw is just pushing, you know, tens of thousands of pounds of pressure. And that's really doing the initial surface cleaning. Those filters have to be changed about every 45 minutes. So it's almost like NASCAR. Every 45 minutes, we go in there with the big, you know, and we open it, we take one filter out, we put a new clean one in.

[Zachary Crockett]

As a part of that process, they're blending together shreds from a variety of soaps that hotel chains send them.

[Sean Seipler]

Different types, different moisture levels, different fragrances. Looks like spaghetti noodles when you take it over to a mixer. And this is where the most important team member we have comes into play.

[Zachary Crockett]

That would be the soap whisperer.

[Sean Seipler]

Our soap whisperer here in Orlando is Carlos Anderson. Affectionately nickname is Los D. He has to determine how much water has to get put in so that it doesn't fall apart, so it doesn't crumble, so it's not too hard, so it's not any of the things that we don't want. We're also adding some sterilization solution. What comes out the end is very marble, you know, tie dye looking bars of soap that have all These mixes, which actually makes a very cool, very unique bar of soap. So that when we handed a bar of soap to somebody, there was some dignity, there was love. That palette is going to the Dominican Republic. It may be going into Nairobi. It may be going into Uganda. It could go to the Philippines, could go into Ukraine to help those that are being impacted right now.

[Zachary Crockett]

It's a noble pursuit, but none of this processing or shipping is free. Early on, Seipler realized he was going to need a funding plan.

[Sean Seipler]

There was no business model. And really, myself and another close friend who was a part of this, we were really going through a lot of money at this time, not seeing a financial result.

[Zachary Crockett]

How did you end up working around that issue?

[Sean Seipler]

There's value here to the hotels. This is a premium service for them. We're reducing landfill waste. We are sending soap back to countries and places where so many of the room attendants are actually from and are themselves sending money back to. In the state of Florida at that time, one third of the room attendants were estimated to be from Haiti. And we were getting ready to send a bunch of soap back to Haiti. There's a PR value here. So what's going on inside of me is we gotta get hotels to pay for this.

[Zachary Crockett]

And they did. It's over a decade later, and the average US hotel partner now pays clean the world 50 to 80 cents per room per month. About a quarter of that is what the hotels were previously paying to waste management companies just to get rid of the soap. And that's without the global benefits and the good PR.

[Sean Seipler]

We recycle 1.4 million hotel rooms on a daily basis. In 13 years, we have diverted 22 million pounds of waste and we have distributed 75 million donated bars of soap to children, families across the globe.

[Zachary Crockett]

It's a warm, fuzzy story for sure. Just remember, though, Clean the World can't save all the soaps. In fact, they'd have to multiply their operation by a factor of about 100 in order to do it. Cornell's Chekhaton Dev thinks a lot about this world of waste that we've created.

[Chaikaton Dev]

While I applaud Clean the World, I would like to see more efforts made at the root of the problem to give people an incentive to bring your soap with you.

[Zachary Crockett]

Until then, every year, around three quarters of a billion barely used hotel soaps, maybe even yours, are headed to a landfill to join their friends. For the economics of everyday things. I'm Zachary Crockett. This episode was produced by Sarah Lilly and mixed by Jeremy Johnston, with help from Greg Rippon and Emma Turrell. You're sitting around with some friends in a garage cooking soap. What did that look like?

[Sean Seipler]

First time that the police drove by the garage, I remember one of my family members going, sean, I think you're gonna need to talk to them about this one.

[Zachary Crockett]

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[Chaikaton Dev]

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