The team at Hilton Kota Kinabalu produced 468 soap bars with their partners from ECOLAB at the launch of Soap for Hope (All photos: Hilton Kota Kinabalu)
Every year, a typical 400-room hotel generates 3.5 tonnes of solid soap waste, and there are a number of global initiatives that salvage these soaps to serve the needs of communities with poor access to sanitation — an act as simple as washing their hands with soap can save thousands of children from fatal diseases.
Hilton Hotels’ soap recycling programme, Soap for Hope, recently arrived in Kota Kinabalu and saw staff personally packing 468 soap bars for young people around Sabah — a painstaking process that includes sanitising and cleaning, grinding, melting, moulding and packaging the leftover soap.
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Hilton Kota Kinabalu has partnered with the Starfish Malaysia Foundation and ECOLAB for the launch of its soap recycling programme, and the hotel has committed to provide 350 recycled bars of soap each month for underprivileged schoolchildren living in hostels in Sabah.
“We are delighted to be launching this programme in line with our goals to double the investment on social impact and to reduce our carbon footprint by half by 2030,” says Hilton Kota Kinabalu general manager Linda Pecoraro. “We rely on the local community for staff so it is important to us that we give back as much as we can. We are committed to making the world a better place for our communities.”
This article first appeared on Sept 23, 2019 in The Edge Malaysia.
