Can a simple bar of soap make the difference between life and death?
Meet Shawn Seipler, who is helping to improve health here and abroad with something most of us just throw away.
Shawn saw the nearly 1 million bars of soap that end up as trash each day as an opportunity, and in 2009, he started Clean the World.
"Two of the top killers of children -- pneumonia and diarrheal disease kills 6,000 children a day, a child every 15 seconds. Te good news is if you teach those children how to wash their hands and you give them soap and proper hygiene, you can cut those deaths in half," Seipler said.
Most of the bars of soap Shawn gets are from hotels, where guests use them and they get discarded. Housekeepers bag and place the used bars of soap into bins, which are then trucked to the recycling center in Orlando.
"For soap, we take it through a sterilization process, surface cleaning and sterilization. We grind it into a soap grind and then we remanufacture it into a new, 3-ounce bar of soap," Seipler said of the process the soap goes through.
Clean the World started in Shawn's garage, and has now grown to 50 employees with 2,500 hotels participating in the program. But Shawn will tell you, it's the volunteers who make the difference in how much product gets to those in need.
"We've had, here in Orlando, over 10,000 volunteers in the last couple of years. [It's] very important to what we're doing. We need bottles sorted, we need soaps sorted."
Clean the World has also partnered with the events and convention industry. They'll send all the ingredients needed to make up a hygiene kit to where ever the convention is being held across the country. The convention goers will take all the ingredients, put them together into kit form and then distribute them locally.
Pallets of boxed soap get distributed by groups like World Vision and Children International to places where even washing in dirty water can cut disease rates.
"In 5 years, 17 million bars of soap have been donated to children, families and mothers in more than 96 countries across the globe," Seipler added.
For all the impressive numbers, Shawn said he's just as proud of the work being done locally with partners who help the homeless.
"Our hygiene products, when they're handed to a child here in Orlando, may be the first time that that children was able to brush their teeth or wash their face before going to school in many many weeks."
Shawn estimates Clean the World has helped keep 5 million pounds of soap out of landfills. The organization has recently expanded to Las Vegas and Hong Kong.