A Virtuous Cycle

By Matt Green

Shawn Seipler always had an entrepreneurial bent. He sold lemonade, cookies and Disney trinkets as early as eight years old, and by high school he had expanded to running a lawn-mowing business with multiple crews.

“I was always trying to find the next opportunity,” Shawn notes, recalling how his business instincts led him to leave college to pursue technology sales, earning a six-figure income by the age of 21. Soon after, he landed a sales role with Channel Intelligence, an ecommerce company whose technology later became the backbone of Google Shopping, and by 2008 he was on the road constantly.

“A typical week for me could start in New York and then Minneapolis, then fly to Los Angeles and then come back home,” Shawn explains of his schedule at the time.

Spending so many nights in hotel rooms, he observed the fresh bar of soap and tiny bottle of shampoo that were placed in his bathroom every day. What happens to these used toiletries when guests check out? he sometimes thought to himself. One evening, in a hotel in Minneapolis, Shawn’s curiosity got the better of him, and he posed the question to the receptionist. He was told the soap and shampoo were thrown away.

This discovery led him down a rabbit hole of online research, and he ran some rough calculations on his laptop: 4.6 million hotel rooms in the United States with average occupancy rates of 60% and an average stay of 1.2 nights. That meant one million bars of soap a day were being thrown out in the U.S. alone.

Although Shawn would not describe himself at the time as a “bleeding heart” environmentalist, his entrepreneurial mind could see the potential in renewable energy, recycling and sustainable technology. Did these millions of bars of soap and bottles of shampoo represent an overlooked opportunity to create value and limit waste?

Shawn, along with a good friend and some family members, began researching soap recycling—a process called “rebatching” whereby soap is melted down and reformed into new bars. That was followed by the question, “What would we do with recycled soap?” Shawn notes. Even if there were a market for the product, it was unlikely it would amount to a lucrative business.

Then Shawn began researching some of the global needs around hygiene and discovered a sobering stat that changed his perspective on the problem. At the time, 9,000 children were dying each day from pneumonia, diarrhea and other hygiene-related illnesses.

Brought up in a Christian family, Shawn had been ingrained with the importance of loving your neighbor. He had always stuck up for underdogs and laughingly recalls how the only skirmishes he got in as a schoolboy were when he was defending someone from getting bullied. For Shawn, the disparity in access to soap represented a similar problem.

“How could we throw away soap while 9,000 mothers are burying their children because they don’t have it?” he asked. “I’ve just got to figure out how to get the million bars of soap in the hands of the 9,000 children.  This is a real great example of how we can love our neighbor and how we can go defeat a bully.”

While still working for Channel Intelligence, Shawn launched Clean the World in his garage in Orlando, Florida. He and a small team melted, sanitized and reformed used soap into new bars by hand. At its inception, Clean the World was a nonprofit, and it collected soap free of charge from hotels and then distributed the recycled bars to other nonprofit partners in places where people needed it.

Not long after, Shawn’s boss told him it was time to make a choice between Clean the World and his corporate job. Channel Intelligence was in the process of being acquired by Google, and it needed his full attention. The decision left Shawn with a moral dilemma.

“Now you’re telling me save children’s lives or take money,” he recalls thinking. “When I stand in front of God, it’s going to be a tough one to explain why I decided to take one and not the other.”

Shawn says he chose to go all in with Clean the World, noting that at the time, he was making $300,000-400,000 a year, and his family’s 401(k) and college savings were fully funded.

“At the time, I didn’t know how to run a nonprofit,” Shawn admits. Within a year of quitting his job, the financial strain was severe. It didn't help that his career transition occurred in 2009 during the Great Recession. “I lost a house, my wife’s car got repossessed, our utilities were cut and I was borrowing money from my dad to feed my family.”

During this crisis, Shawn recalls going to Office Max to purchase a ream of printer paper. He noticed recycled paper was more expensive than non-recycled, and it occurred to him that people were willingly spending more for the recycled option. He wondered if the same principle applied to soap. Would hotels pay him to take their used soap if they knew it would be recycled?

Shawn’s hopes were dashed when he approached the hotels who’d been offloading their used soap to him for free. None of them were willing to pay.

That changed, however, when the local Fox TV affiliate ran a story on Clean the World and followed a distribution team to Haiti where the soap was given to families in need in the wake of a devastating 2010 earthquake. Other Fox stations around the country picked up the story, and it was seen by a producer at CBS, leading to a spot on the Evening News.

As plans were coming together for the CBS piece, the producers explained that they wanted to include a partner hotel in the story. Shawn realized this was a God-given opportunity to leverage the coverage from the story to persuade hotels to pay Clean the World to take their soap. He reached out to the Peabody in Orlando—a property he had been attempting to bring on as a paying partner.

“We can get you on CBS Evening News. In turn, you’ve got to pay for the program, and you’ve got to shout from the mountaintops that this is the greatest thing you’ve ever paid for,” Shawn recalls explaining to the executives at Peabody. “And they said, ‘Done. Got it.’”

Shawn still has a copy of the check he got from the Peabody: $357 for the 900 rooms at 40 cents per room.

“ I’m getting emotional thinking about it,” he says. “It was just like God said, ‘I got you.’”

In the wake of the CBS Evening News story, Shawn’s phone began ringing with calls from hotels in environmentally conscious states—California, Colorado and Oregon—all of them willing to pay the fees. More hotels followed suit as they saw how working with Clean the World aligned with their sustainability goals.

Clean the World’s clients include individual hotels, management companies that operate multiple hotels and corporations (such as Hilton) of which all their properties—Hampton, Hilton Garden, DoubleTree and so on—participate. For many, a partnership with Clean the World involves informing guests that their used soap will be recycled and distributed in needy communities.

As the organization grew, Shawn began to encounter limitations scaling Clean the World as long as it was organized as a nonprofit.

“Even though we began to have earned income, we needed facilities, equipment and capital,” he explains. “ Banks were not very willing to loan to nonprofits, and donors were now not coming in because they said, ‘Why do you need our money? You’ve got all these paying hotels.’”

Shawn realized it would be advantageous to restructure Clean the World as a hybrid organization: a for-profit business, which receives income from the soap recycling services and other business ventures; and a nonprofit (the WASH Foundation), which handles soap distribution and hygiene education.

This dual model ensures scalability and sustainability. The WASH Foundation is able to raise funds and carry out its humanitarian mission, and Clean the World is able to generate revenue from products and services—passing along a portion of its profits to the foundation as its largest donor.

“Our nonprofit focuses on impact,” Shawn explains, “while the for-profit generates the capital and infrastructure needed to support that impact.”

While he was initially concerned hotel partners would resist the transition—instead of donating to a 501(c)3, they would now be paying a for-profit business to recycle their soap. When they saw that the change would empower Clean the World to help more people, the tax deduction didn’t matter.

“What they wanted to see from us was sustainability and growth,” Shawn says. “ We’ve been able to expand across the globe, we’ve added new products, we’ve added more impact. So, it’s worked out, and it was a good move for us.”

In 2013 Clean the World earned a coveted B Corp certification. B Corporations are for-profit companies that must meet standards of social and environmental performance, accountability and transparency. The certification is provided by B Lab, a nonprofit that evaluates companies for social responsibility. Among the 8,000-plus B Corps that exist globally, notable examples include Patagonia, Ben & Jerry’s, TOMS and Warby Parker.

The WASH Foundation sits on the United Nations Global WASH Cluster, which coordinates efforts to improve water, sanitation and hygiene. As a result of the cluster’s contribution to global hygiene, the rate of children under the age of five dying from hydrolytic illnesses has declined more than 60% in the last 15 years.

This marriage of business and mission is part of a broader trend of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). Customers and shareholders are increasingly demanding that the businesses they support commit to environmental sustainability and ethical practices alongside generating a profit. Organizations like Clean the World provide an opportunity for large corporations to put their money where their mouth is and to attract customers who value these practices.

Shawn has coined his own term for the marriage of doing well and doing good: conscious capitalism. He points to the countless ills plaguing the world—from environmental degradation to poverty and disease—and notes that government will not be able to solve all these problems.

“We can’t rely on government to do that. Government is inefficient, and no matter how much money you put into it, they can’t solve the world’s ills,” he argues. “Likewise, the nonprofit world—while they may have so much of the impact, and they’re on the front lines of it all—they don’t have enough capital.”

Shawn believes the answer is tapping into the vast resources and innovation of the private sector to solve the world’s most intractable problems. For Clean the World, that involves leveraging social pressure toward environmental responsibility and humanitarian concern—and doing it at scale with massive corporate partners.

“For too long, people thought you had to choose between helping people and making money,” Shawn explains. “But that’s a false choice. Conscious capitalism allows us to create value for shareholders while making the world a better place.”

While Baby Boomers are the most generous generation when it comes to philanthropic giving, Shawn notes that Millennials and Generations Z and Alpha want to integrate their social consciousness with their work life and consumer choices. Responding to these trends will allow businesses and nonprofits to stay competitive in the decades to come.

“Tons of data show that companies and brands who promote their corporate social responsibility and their impact work will outperform their competitors by three and a half percent,” Shawn notes. “It’s a very powerful tool to allow companies to be driven by the marketplace and by their consumers in a way that integrates social, environmental and other programming and services.”

Today, Clean the World employs about 100 people and operates recycling centers in Orlando, Las Vegas, Punta Cana (Dominican Republic), Amsterdam and Hong Kong, with additional offices in Montreal, London and Singapore. It partners with more than 9,000 hotels and has distributed more than 88 million bars of soap to families in 127 countries. While there are other companies that recycle hotel soap, Shawn estimates Clean the World has 98% of the market share for soap recycling and 100% of the market share of toiletry container recycling.

Shawn credits his Christian upbringing with shaping his moral compass and fueling his mission. “The charge to love your neighbor is the core of what we do,” he explains. However, Clean the World is not a faith-based organization. “We don’t proselytize,” he notes. “But our work—helping people live healthier, more dignified lives—is an expression of that love-your-neighbor ethic.”

This ethos extends to his leadership style. Clean the World has been named a top workplace in Orlando four years running. “Our culture is built on collaboration, compassion and accountability,” Shawn shares. “We’re not just a company; we’re a community.”

He gets emotional recounting how, during last year’s Christmas party, employees were challenged to give to a $10,000 WASH Foundation project to dig a water well and install a rainwater capture project in Uganda. By the time the night was over, they had raised enough for three wells.

“As a CEO, it was one of the best moments in 15 years that I’ve had,” Shawn notes, describing how the employees of Clean the World and the WASH Foundation are bought in to the cause. “It speaks to who we really have here on the team.”

The organization’s impact extends beyond soap. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Clean the World distributed hygiene kits to vulnerable communities, and it has launched mobile showers for people experiencing homelessness.

Looking ahead, Shawn is eager to expand into new areas, including food security and advanced plastic recycling. The organization is piloting programs to create reusable plastic products from hotel waste, such as toiletry bottles. “We’re committed to circular solutions that reduce waste and benefit communities,” he says.

A growing part of Clean the World’s business is hosting events at which companies such as Amazon, Chick-fil-A and UPS bring their staff for team-building experiences and assemble food and hygiene kits. Since 2012, corporate participants have donated 225,000 hours of volunteer time and assembled 6 million kits to be distributed by CTW’s partners.

Shawn’s vision also includes developing an experiential college program to teach social entrepreneurship. “Young people are passionate about solving the world’s problems,” he notes. “We want to equip them with the tools to do that.”

For Shawn, Clean the World is more than a business—it’s a calling. “I have five children,” he says. “When I think about the world they’ll inherit, I’m motivated to leave it better than I found it.”

Whether it’s striking water in Uganda to build a well or handing out hygiene kits in California’s wildfire zones, Clean the World exemplifies what happens when innovation meets compassion. Shawn’s journey reminds us that big changes can start with small questions.

“At the end of the day,” Shawn says, “we’re just trying to love our neighbors—one bar of soap at a time.”