Here is a great char­ity idea, bring­ing used soap to peo­ple in Africa. For those who live on less than a dol­lar a day, a bar of soap is a lux­ury and the money could be bet­ter spent on food. But it is the inabil­ity to stay clean and ster­ile that is one of the fac­tors that keep many in poverty. Many dis­eases that could be pre­vented from using soap make many ill and fur­ther unable to pro­vide for themselves.

A for­mer Ugan­dan who makes his home in Atlanta has found a way to help his home­land. Der­reck Kay­ongo recy­cles used soap bars from Amer­i­can hotels and ster­il­izes them for use by the poor in Uganda.

From this Asso­ci­ated Press arti­cle that we found at KOAT, writer Dionne Walker explains the soap recy­cling process.

Clean­ing up with used soap sounds, well, dirty.

But Kay­ongo said soaps will be sep­a­rated by hotel brand and gen­tly washed to remove makeup and other sur­face dirt. Next, bars will go into a high-temperature oven where they will melt and trans­form into a soapy, ster­ile, slurry. Kay­ongo said the mix­ture will go into molds to harden and emerge as large bars of soap.

“All it needs is just clean­ing and re-melting and remold­ing,” he said.

Each day, in mil­lions of Amer­i­can hotel rooms, the clean­ing staff replaces soap and other toiletries.

Patrick Maher, a con­sul­tant to the Amer­i­can Hotel & Lodg­ing Asso­ci­a­tion, said hotels usu­ally throw away used soap. But he said non­prof­its have begun step­ping up to recy­cle soap for char­i­ta­ble purposes.

“It’s one of the new things this year,” Maher said.

One such char­ity, Florida-based Clean the World, says it has col­lected about 17,000 pounds of used soap since Feb­ru­ary for dis­tri­b­u­tion in impov­er­ished coun­tries worldwide.

For the Global Soap Project, Kay­ongo says he has gath­ered 10,000 pounds of used hotel soap from 60 hotels in Geor­gia, Florida and Ten­nessee. Hotels col­lect lightly used bars which they place in bins. One of Kayongo’s 10 vol­un­teers takes the bars to a donated ware­house near Atlanta that he’s using.

Kayongo’s own fam­ily had once thrived off his father’s busi­ness mak­ing soaps and run­ning a print­ing press in Uganda. But Kay­ongo said they went from being mem­bers of the mid­dle class to refugees, los­ing every­thing under the harsh rule of for­mer Ugan­dan dic­ta­tor Idi Amin.

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