Soap Aid

Soap Aid is a not-for-profit organisation founded in Australia by a Melbourne family which has had a 30 year involvement in the hotel amenities supply business. The CEO, Michael Matulick, set about improving the sustainability credentials of the business some 5 years ago. During this process, he was inspired to completely reduce their commercial impact on the environment - namely to reduce waste and landfill levels in Australia. He quickly discovered the “trash” could be converted into a treasure that could save lives domestically and globally.

Australians are the second highest producers of waste in the world behind the US with each person disposing over 690Kgs to landfill each year. Waste sent to landfill sites decays and generates methane which has the ability to throw back heat into the atmosphere at a rate of more than 23 times greater than Carbon Dioxide making it a leading contributor to global warming (Source: http://www.cleanup.org.au/au/Campaigns/plastic-bag-facts.html). Soap Aid collects soap from hotel rooms that would otherwise be used once or twice before being thrown in the rubbish and being sent as general waste to landfill. Soap Aid currently collects waste soap from almost 25,000 hotel rooms and has ambitions to increase this number exponentially in the next 5 years.
Today 2.6 billion people lack adequate sanitation across the world and, as a direct result, 1.8 million children under the age of 5 die each year due to hygiene related illnesses. By the simple act of hand washing with a bar of soap we can potentially reduce the number of deaths by over 40 per cent (Source: World Health Organisation). A plethora of medical research has highlighted the fact that hand washing with soap has a dramatic impact through saving lives and preventing death and illness caused by diarrhoea, trachoma, worm infection, chronic malnutrition, swine flu, pneumonia, SARS, sickness in AIDS patients and general neonatal mortality.
Soap Aid was established in 2011 and is the only organisation to conduct this work in Australia. Soap Aid’s work is conducted both locally and globally. Currently, the soap collection and recycling occurs exclusively within Australia and predominantly in Melbourne, Victoria. Soap Aid soap has been donated in small volumes to a remote Australian community, a Cambodian orphanage and community school in rural Papua New Guinea. Soap Aid has partnered with Rotary International to send 140,000 bars of soap to Bihar, India.

Soap Aid is governed by a board of professional volunteers and relies heavily on the pro bono support of commercial partners and volunteers to maintain and grow the Soap Aid program.