November 11, 2025 • 37 mins
One hotel room. One forgotten bar of soap. One world-changing idea. In the first inaugural episode of The Ripple Effect, comedian Jenna Kim Jones sits down with Clean the World founder Shawn Seipler to unpack the incredible true story of how recycled hotel soap grew from a garage experiment into a global life-saving mission.
Find out more and make your own ripple at CleanTheWorld.org.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey there, I'm Jenni Kim Jones. This is The Ripple Effect,
and this is our first episode, and this is the
first of many stories that I hope will convince you that,
you guys, humanity is not just a total dumpster fire. Okay,
it's not. There are great people in the world, and
this show is going to show you regular old people
like you and me. And they took something small, this
(00:25):
tiny thing, and made a massive impact and I can't
wait to tell you about it. That's really what we
mean by the ripple Effect. You know, let me give
you an example. I make one decision, like I compliment
someone on their outfit, and then that person's feeling good,
so they decide to open the door for someone else
who is maybe rushing to a job interview. And then
that person's like, hey, they held the door for me.
(00:46):
If they got some confidence, then they do well in
that interview and bam, they get the job. That's what
we're talking about. Just that small little decision, one decision
that brings you closer to someone else, can change the
way someone's day goes. Heck, change the way their life goes.
And that's what we want here. We want more human connection.
(01:10):
But before we meet our first interview today and we
tell you this incredible story, I feel like maybe I
should introduce myself. Maybe some of you know me already,
maybe you don't. I am Jenik Kim Jones, and I'm
a stand up comedian. That's what I do. It's always
awkward when you tell people you're a stand up comedian
because then immediately they're like, oh yeah, tell me a joke,
(01:30):
and I'm like, okay, calm down. But what's cool about
my job is that I travel all over the place.
I have been to every town, every weird place you
can imagine, I've probably been there. And that's actually one
of the things I love the most is because I
go to all these places and I meet so many people,
and I love learning about their way of life. You know,
every town has a different vibe, different energy, something they
(01:52):
really care about. But you know it's really wild is
in all of these places, I will tell jokes and
oftentimes the same jokes to differ from people, and they'll laugh.
Because we relate to each other in a lot more
ways than I think we realize. We have so much
in common, even when it seems like we have absolutely
nothing in common. The cool thing about comedy is that
(02:15):
it's little by little. Okay. So when I first started
open mics in New York City and there were maybe, like,
I don't know, four people there, and three of them
were stand up comedians also trying to tell jokes. You know,
you start out and you're not good at it, and
it's awkward, and you tell a joke and nobody laughs,
and it's just so painful, and you think, why am
I doing this? But then something in your heart goes, no,
(02:37):
you can do this. You have to do this. That's
what it was like for me. I was starting out.
I'm like, why am I not? What does this so hard?
And then something happens. You get a little laugh, right,
and I remember you, guys, I remember some of my
early jokes. Okay, so here's one.
Speaker 2 (02:53):
All right.
Speaker 1 (02:54):
The joke was I saw a girl. She was wearing
a shirt that said I only date vampires sorry, and
I thought, oh my goodness, that is such a creative
way to tell people you never date. Okay, that joke
killed Twilight was a big deal, so keep that in mind.
Everybody was into the vampire movies. Okay. I remember another
early joke. I used to say, you know, when I'm
(03:15):
not doing stand up comedy, I'm a stay at home mom.
I wear the yoga pants in the family, but I
never do yoga in them. Ever, so dumb. These are
the early jokes I was telling, and I was getting
laugh by laugh and just little by little. And what
was cool is it slowly rippled into something more where
I could turn it into a career where I did
(03:36):
a show a few months ago where I had a
thousand people and we were all laughing. It was great.
And that's where it ties in to the ripple. Okay,
the ripple effect is here. You see what I did there.
It's called branding. All right, we are the ripple effect.
We're creating ripples all over the place in our lives now.
When I got a call about this podcast, it was
a little spooky, I'm gonna be honest, because I had
(03:56):
said to my husband just a couple of weeks before that,
I was just so frustrated with social media. I didn't
like what it was doing to me. I'm hearing bad
news all the time. I'm seeing all these things in
my life that are like making me jealous. I'm not
a jealous person. I want everybody to be happy. I
know there's good news out there, but nobody's talking about
it because they just want stuff to go viral and
(04:18):
everybody to fight. And then I got a call and
they're like, hey, do you want to make a podcast
about good people doing good things, putting good into the world.
And I'm like, wait, yes, yes, I really really do.
That sounds amazing. So if you've concluded that there's nothing
good that can come out of picking up your phone
one more time, but you also like, can't not pick
(04:41):
up your phone because it's important and we use it
for everything, please consider the ripple effect. You're safe haven. Okay,
we are your inner circle. You can trust us. Today
we're gonna be talking about soap. Okay, maybe I built
that up like a little bit too much because it's soap,
and you're thinking, what I'm underselling it right now? All right,
(05:03):
because this episode, let's get real, it's not just soap.
It's obviously a lot bigger than that. As a comedian,
I travel all the time. I'm out at shows, I
shake a lot of people's hands. I come back to
my hotel. I use the soap. I travel all day.
I use the soap. We use it in the hotel
room and then we just leave it behind. I do.
I don't take it with me. There's just you know,
(05:24):
I use the bar of soap, I leave it there,
or I use a little bit of bodywash, I leave
it there. And I can't believe how much waste that
is if you really think about it, because what do
they do with that soap? There's like islands made out
of trash floating in the ocean. That is so much trash.
I care about that. That seems like a lot. Well,
our guest today, Sean Seipler, turns out he also thought
(05:47):
a lot about soap. And instead of shrugging it off
in his hotel room like I would and just turning
on Shark Tank and reruns of Gilmore Girls, which is
my favorite thing to watch in hotel rooms, he actually
did something. He started an organization called Clean the World.
And you have never heard a better origin story, by
(06:08):
the way. Okay, it has everything from cooking suspicious things
in garages to having his whole family involved. And you
know what's wild, This crazy idea worked. Today. Sean's doing
so much more than just recycling old soap, And we're
going to get into all of those soapy Ripley ways
that he took his idea and gave it a life
of its own, changing lives all over the world. And
(06:31):
at the end of our conversation, we have ways for
you to get in on those good feelings that we've
got going on here at the Ripple Effect, So please
stick around. It has been so great to get to
know you a little bit, and I know that we're
gonna have a great time this season, and I am
so excited, and I can go on and on. I
could talk forever, I really could, but honestly, I feel
like we'd probably hear from you about that. So I'm
(06:52):
gonna stop talking so much right this second, and without
further ado, I'm going to introduce our guest, Sean Zeipler
from Clean in the World. Sean, it's so great to
have you here.
Speaker 2 (07:06):
It's great to be had here, Jenna. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1 (07:09):
Oh good, excellent. I'm so happy you're here. I'm so
excited to talk to you. And I know that you've
told your story before, but I can't wait to hear
it because I know a lot about you and Clean
the World, and I think what you guys are doing
is amazing. So first of all, Sean. I think we
need to start with the obvious question here. Okay, you
(07:30):
are the guy that asked, what in the world happens
to all this hotel soap?
Speaker 2 (07:35):
That's you, right, that's right.
Speaker 1 (07:37):
How did you come to that question? Because I'm not
sure a lot of people have asked that question.
Speaker 2 (07:42):
That's a great question to ask. So seventeen years ago,
I was running a global sales team for a technology company,
and I was on the road four nights a week,
and there was something inside of me. It's the entrepreneur
that goes back to when my first lemonadees fan when
I was eight years old, that wanted to start my
own business. I wanted to do my own thing, and
(08:03):
I thought at the time that I wanted to do
something in sustainability or green energy or something along those lines. Really,
as an entrepreneur, thinking about seventeen years ago, what would
be you know, So I'm looking at solar panels and
wind turbines and you know, all these various things, and
I'm just thinking about items of waste. And so one
(08:23):
night I'm in a hotel room in Minneapolis. Now, my
two accounts in Minneapolis were Best Buy and Target. They
were the two biggest accounts for the company. So I
was in Minneapolis forty nights a year. Now, I am
a thin blooded South Floridian who when I travel to Minneapolis,
I feel like I have to survive, you know, like
(08:43):
I just got to get through the night. Yes, I
would bundle up in my hotel room and I'd have
cocktails and that's what would get me through the night.
And so one of those nights, a couple of cocktails
in hand, I started thinking about what happened to the
little bar soap and the little bottle shampoo when I
was done using it? What did the hotel do with it?
And so I called the front desk and asked what
happened to the soap in the shampoo when I was
(09:04):
done with it? And they chuckled and said, Sean, why
don't you have another cocktail? And I said, that's a
great idea, send one up. But know really, what happens
with the soap what I'm done? They said, we throw
it away. I said, okay. So I went to my
laptop right there and there, and I did some quick googling.
And at that time, there were four point six million
hotel rooms in the US. There was an average occupancy
(09:27):
rate of sixty percent, you know, there was an average
night and stay of like one point two. And so
I did this like back of envelope math, and I said,
if hotels are throwing their soap away, we're throwing away
a million bars of soap every day out of hotels
across the US, and a couple million bars of soap
out of hotels across the globe. So I found a study,
and then a second study at a third stay. I
(09:49):
end up finding about nine studies. I can remember the
night that I was on my bed. I had those
studies all laid out in front of me, and they
all said the exact same thing. At that time, in
two thousand and nine, there were nine thousand children under
the age of five that were dying every day to
pneumonia and diar real disease and number one and number
two leading cause of death amongst children worldwide, five and
a half million children a year. And all these studies
(10:11):
showed that if we just gave them soap and taught
them how and when to wash their hands, that we
could cut those deaths in half. And so that was
my AHA moment, the moment that I said, okay, there's
something here. I'm going to figure out how to get
the soap from hotels, recycle it, and get it in
the hands of those children and families around the world who,
in so many cases were literally dying because of a
(10:33):
lack of ig.
Speaker 1 (10:34):
Oh my goodness. Okay, so you found the purpose, you
found the why. I'd love to know what was day
one at clean the world versus what does it look
like right now?
Speaker 2 (10:44):
So two thousand and nine, so I am having to
be half German and half Puerto Rican. So I called
my German family members who happened to have all the
money in the family, and I said, hey, I got
this great idea. I'm going to collect soap from motels.
I'm going to recycle it, send it people around the world.
I need your money. Can you support me and all
my germ foumidly said no. They said that's dumb. I
get the day job. We're not going to do that.
(11:05):
So I switched my kitchen up a little bit. I
went to my Puerto Rican family members a little crazier,
and I said, listen, I got this great idea. We're
gonna get together. We're going to take soap from hotels,
recycle it and send it to children around the world
to save their lives. And all my Puerto Rican found
members said, we are in so we got ourselves, myself,
my cousin, my uncle. We all show up in a
(11:25):
single car garage. We're all sitting around on upside down
pickle buckets with potato peelers. We're collecting soap from hotel
across Orlando. We're scraping the outside of the bars of
soap with the potato peelers to surface clean it. We
then have a meat grinder and so one of us
is on the meat grinder grinding the soap up into
a noodle. And we have a table with four ken
(11:45):
more cookers on it, and then that's where we're cooking
that soap into a paste. So I would cook for
about two hours, get all the impurities cooked out of it,
turn it into a paste. After it was done cooking,
put more wax paper top it, clamp it. It would
dry overnight. We had a fan blowing the soap drive.
The power would cut in the house every like thirty minutes,
which was a big deal because that's when the salsa
(12:07):
and the merangue stopped playing. And with my Puerto Rican workforce.
It wasn't get paid a lot of money. The music
had to be playing, so when the music stopped working,
stop so we had to figure out when you could
have a meat grinder on and the cookers and all that.
And true story, the first time that the police came
by the garage, they wanted to see what we were
cooking in that garage.
Speaker 1 (12:27):
Of course they did showed up like what kind of
breaking bad situation is happening in this garage?
Speaker 2 (12:33):
Breaking Bad was top of the charts that year, by
the way, so it was very apropos for what was
going on new culture. And so that's how we launched.
And we made five hundred bars of soap a day.
We grinded it in a single car garage. And as
I just fast forward you to today, we have almost
ten thousand hotels that operate our soap and plastic recycling program.
(12:58):
We have offices in Orlando, Las VEGASUS, Montreal, Puttakana, Amsterdam,
Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, Taiwan. We operate all across Europe,
the US. We have diverted over thirty million pounds of
waste from landfill and we have created and distributed ninety
million free bars of soap to children, families, mothers in
(13:20):
one hundred and twenty seven countries across the globe, and
the biggest, the best at of all is that the
death rate to children under the age of five dying
to hydro related illnesses has decreased by more than sixty
percent since the day we started. And the United Nations
was so impressed with our work that our nonprofit, the
Wash Foundation, they actually put us on the United Nations
(13:41):
Global Wash Cluster, and so we actually have a seat
at the UN General Assembly because of the work that
we've done, which started seventeen years ago with a bunch
of Puerto Ricans cooking soap in a garage.
Speaker 1 (13:51):
With the police coming by, Like this smells really interesting.
What do you guys do? I mean the aroma of
all that soap? Okay, So, I'm in hotel rooms all
the time too. I'm a comedian. I have a lot
of ideas alone in a hotel room, and I'm gonna
be honest, not one of them has left the hotel
room and even made it to the free breakfast in
the lobby. Okay. So the fact that you took this
(14:14):
idea because it sounds like it wasn't easy. How did
you keep going? It would be very easy for someone
to say, this is too hard? So what made you go?
I can't stop.
Speaker 2 (14:27):
Jennet, that's an awesome question. I'm getting emotional as you
ask because of this moment. When we did our first
trip to Haiti in July of nine. We fly in
on a Wednesday, July first of nine. I'm on a
DC three airplane flying over the Bermuda Triangle. This plane's
been built in the nineteen forties. The pilots are actually
(14:50):
playing with me a little bit going over the Bebitter Triangle,
going oh, our instruments are not working anymore, and I'm like, Gods,
I'm not funny, not funny at all. We get to
the capation is the northern part of Haiti. We land.
We had to circle the runway once because there's a
cow on the runway. Cow gets off the runway. We land.
They say we're going to a church and that's the
(15:10):
first place we're going. We've got like two thousand bars
of soap that we have been making in the garage.
We load up a van immediately. When I get out,
there's just a lot of need. There's a lot of
people around. It's chaos. As a frequent traveler, that was
a shorter airplane flight for me from Fort Myers, Florida
to go there that it is for me to go
to Washington, d C. So it's a stone's throwaway from
(15:34):
where I live to come into this sectreat poverty. Right.
So then we come into the back of this building,
which is this massive church. It's an open air church
because in Haiti, when you put a roof on your building,
you have to start paying taxes. So what everyone does
is they build their first level and then they build
the like for the second level, they just sort of
put the columns up and they never put the roof
(15:57):
on it so that they don't pay taxes, and so
all structures are like that. So I come in and
there are ten thousand people in this church. Oh my gosh,
and we've got two thousand bars of soap, and my
logical mind, you know, is going on. This is unreal.
We're not gonna be able to help, and I can
be able to help. There's a pastor speaking in Creole.
There's an interpreter. He starts describing what happens when a
(16:19):
child gets direal disease and how the stomach starts cramping,
and how they start to vomit, and how they start
to they dehydrate, and how they start to shrivel. And
this is what happens when they had diaryl Jase and
they pass and he says, if you've experienced that, please
come up here. And fifty women come walking up on
(16:40):
stage and start telling their stories. And I buried one child,
and I had my daughter and I didn't know what
to do, and I went to the priest, and I
went to the voodoo doctor, and I went to the
had nothing to do. I didn't know what to do,
and she died. And so one mother after another after
another is telling me about the one and the two
and the three children that they that died that they
(17:02):
had to bury, and it just hit heavy in the heart,
and I'm like, it doesn't matter what comes my way.
I'm going to figure out how to help these women.
I'm going to figure out how to get soap into
the hands of these people. And this is a tragedy.
This is not fair. We're throwing away million bars of
soap every day, and all they need is soap to
(17:24):
not have to bury their children. And so that was
the moment for me that was like, we're going to
keep fighting and fighting and fighting huge.
Speaker 1 (17:33):
I have four kids as well. I think you mentioned
you had four kids and there's just nothing. You have
five now, Oh my goodness, that's amazing. It's getting me
emotional because I can't imagine going through that for something
that I take for granted. I mean, soap, I have it,
I need to use it. I have to often remind
(17:54):
my children to use it. But I'm grateful for you.
I'm just going to tell you right now.
Speaker 2 (17:59):
Thank you. I appreciate that. I appreciate that emotion too,
and I feel that you know from me, and that's
that's it, and that's my You know, as I speak
to people again around the world, it's like whatever kind
of breaks your heart, whatever whatever gets you. You know,
you're talking about the ripple effect, I mean whatever is that? Yeah,
that just you become passionate about you become go for it,
because we need a lot of that to happen to
(18:20):
make this world a better place. You know, we need
our hearts to break over things for us to go
figure out those awesome solutions to make a difference that's right.
Speaker 1 (18:27):
To solve a problem. These problems you're solving are massive. Okay,
I just want to remind some of us, like about
the numbers you've given, because again, we started in a
garage and now we're like changing lives all over the world.
You said, ninety million bars of soap.
Speaker 2 (18:42):
Ninety million free bars of soap have been distributed to
those in need around the world, locally and across the globe.
Speaker 1 (18:48):
Okay, So how did you go to the hotels then, Like,
how was that process of saying, hey, do you want
to do something great?
Speaker 2 (18:55):
Is that?
Speaker 1 (18:55):
I mean, how did you get them to be involved?
Because you you have thousands of hotels?
Speaker 2 (18:59):
You said, that's that's right, Well we do today. Going
back seventeen years ago, the first hotels in central Florida
we went to We said, hey, we'll take your soap,
we'll take your plastic, we'll do it for free. Just
give it to us, and we'll get donations and we'll
get grants and we'll go figure out how to get
the money. Okay, Well that didn't work. As a matter
(19:19):
of fact, we went Brooke, Oh my goodness. We did
not receive grants, we did not receive donations, and I
personally went from a guy in his early thirties, with
tens of thousand stock options, two homes, the biggest seven
to fifty on the block to losing a home. My
wife's car got repossessed. The electricity was cutting my house
at one point. I mean we went I went through
(19:40):
all the kids' college funds, all the four one K
through the whole thing. So it forced us to have
to figure out a business model, and many months into it,
I said, listen, we're providing a value to hotels. The
hotels are getting a program that reduces landfill waste, it
helps them save lives. We're sending the soap back to
(20:01):
the countries where many of the housekeepers and the room
attendants are from and actually are sending money back to.
So we're sending the soap to Haiti in New Mexico
and Guatemala, and these are where the housekeepers are from.
So this is really like a human resource program, right.
This is one that the room intendants can feel proud
of and it can feel really good about that their
hotels are doing it. So I kind of bundled up
(20:23):
all that value and I went back to the hotels
and I said, listen, I think you should pay for
this program. I think this is a recycling program that
just like you pay somebody to take your trash away,
I think you should pay me to take your soap
in your plastic away. And so when I first went
to them with that proposition in two thousand and nine,
when the economy was really bad, they all said no,
(20:43):
they said we're not going to do that. And I said, okay,
so we're having a problem here. We were starting to
really go under. So what happened is our local Fox
thirty five they wanted to do a piece on us,
and they went with us to Haiti on our first distribution,
and so they documented and it did a nice, a
wonderful news piece on us distributing in CAPATIONI, Haiti. And
(21:05):
that news piece ran on the local Fox Orlando thirty five,
and then it ran on a couple of other Fox
stations across the US, and it just so happened to
run in New York the night that Katie Kurk, who
was doing CBS Evening News that her senior producer, was
watching the local Fox at night and saw the piece
on us.
Speaker 3 (21:24):
Thousands of Haitians celebrate their faith, but it's a worldly
offering that sets off a scramble, not for free food
or medicine, but soap precious here. It would have been
trash in the United States if not for Sean Zeipler.
Speaker 2 (21:42):
And so all of a sudden, I get a call
on the phone from Katie Kirk, senior producer and at
the time, the H one N one flew virus was
happening across the US, and they said, we want to
do a piece on you guys because we liked the
concept of washing your hands during the H one N
law and we want to go to Haiti, so we
want to start in the hotel and see the recycling. Now,
(22:04):
by the way, I'm still in the garage when I'm
taking this call, so they're like, you know, can we
come down and see your foting.
Speaker 1 (22:09):
Can you turn the music down please, we can't hear you.
Speaker 2 (22:12):
They're like, yeah, but yo, you can definitely come to
our facility. We'd love to host you at our our
magnific Sylvie out there. And so at that time I
was talking to the Peabody Hotel here in Orlando, and
I called the Peabody right after CBS calls me. I said, listen,
I have an opportunity to put you on CBS Evening News.
But in order to do that, I need you to
(22:32):
buy my program, and I need you to shout from
the mountaintop. So this is the greatest thing that you've
ever paid for, And so they agreed. The first rate
was forty cents per room per month, so they had
about a nine hundred room hotel, so they were paying
three hundred and fifty seven dollars a month. And I
remember when I got the check in the first check
(22:54):
from the Peabody and just starting to cry. But it
was like, if I could get one, I can get
them all. And at that point we did the CBS
Eating News piece. It was a huge success. The phone
started ringing off the hooks and they never stopped ringing
after that. And you know, people at that time wanted
to help Adie, they wanted to get involved, So that
(23:14):
is really what turned it for us. And then hotels
started paying and so now we have does ten thousand
hotels actually pay us to recycle all their soap and
they're plastic.
Speaker 1 (23:23):
Honestly, I feel like, you know, my next podcast is
just going to have to be like a deep dive
on your logistics, because it seems like it's so much yes,
that's right, it got to be so intense. Let's go
back to that first trip in Haiti. So you are
in Haiti and you have these two thousand bars of soap.
It's your first trip, right, and you're seeing this and
(23:45):
you've handed out soap. And then months later you're back again,
right because of the earthquake. Are there any specific moments
or people we're talking here, Like you mentioned about the
ripple effect, did you see any of your ripples take effect? Yeah?
Speaker 2 (23:59):
Yeah, you know, after that first trip to Haiti, I
made a commitment that I'm going to get as much
soap into this region in Haiti as I possibly can.
And so since that time, we've said about three million
bars of soap, wow, of the ninety three million just
into that portion of Haiti. I've been there several times
to the Evangelical Church of Haiti. We did see a
(24:20):
lot of kids that we started off, you know, in nine,
and we saw them in ten and eleven and twelve,
even some orphanages that we supported. They were healthy, they
understood you know, proper hygiene, and they were educating others
as well. If you remember what I kind of went
through those studies. It was the soap, but it was
also learning how lid to wash your hands. I mean,
(24:40):
there's been many schools that we've gone back to. We've
put a ton of posters in these schools and hand
washing stations and a lot of great work there. And
we're doing a ton right now in the Dominican Republic,
same piece of land, Little Louis or access right now.
It's tough right now into Haiti. We're actually not going
into Haiti right now because of the you know, the
turbulence of the violence. Right but Eighti's just been a unfortunately,
(25:03):
it's just a tough place to continue to work in
right now.
Speaker 1 (25:07):
Yeah, you said you had offices all over the world.
This is a world truly clean the world is what's
so cool. And I noticed your shirt. It says what
does your shirt say?
Speaker 2 (25:18):
Tell us all wash your hands, bro? Can you see it?
Speaker 1 (25:21):
Wash your hands?
Speaker 3 (25:22):
Bro?
Speaker 2 (25:23):
Yes?
Speaker 1 (25:25):
And that's your slogan, right, that's your out there educating
people and telling everybody, hey, wash your hands.
Speaker 2 (25:31):
Without a doubt. So we have a program called Washington Schools. Okay,
So we've done this program in Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, in
Dominican Republic and so and we did this in the
early days in Haiti, and so we go into a
district where there are multiple school children and we teach
them how in to wash their hands, and when they
demonstrate that they know how to wash their hands, we
(25:54):
give them soap that they can use at school, but
that they can also take home to the family. So
the treat there is that they gets something to take
them to the family. Now, before we do all that,
we baseline tests and study cases of diar real disease,
cases of pneumonia, school attendance. So we get all this
baseline data. Then we take them through our program and
(26:14):
then we check them it ninety days, at six months
and at twelve months. Okay, across the board, fifty five
percent reduction in diar real disease pneumonia cases. And here's
the best part, well one of the best parts, fifty
percent increase in school attendance because now they're going to
school because they're not sick and so they're getting edge healthy.
(26:37):
They're healthy. So then let me give you another ripple.
Then we're in these schools and we start doing it
in kindergarten, in third grade and fourth feber Do elementary,
then we start going into middle school, and we start
noticing that young girls I have four daughters, that they
are dropping out of school at the time that their
menstrual cycle starts, and why because they don't have proper
(27:00):
hygiene products. They are stigmatized. And that's basically the time
that they get out of being educated. And the other
thing that happens is the boys then continue to get educated,
and then once they get educated, they leave the community
because they're educated and they want to get out and
they want to go right. So we said, now we're
not going to do that. This this father of four daughters,
(27:21):
it's not going to have that aage. And here's what
we started doing. We started in the realm of recycling.
We were able to make sustainable, recyclable menstrual pads and
hygie products. So we were able to take products that
were being discarded, bring them in, clean them, and turn
them into pads. And so we did a number of things.
(27:42):
Number one is we destigmatized through education. We started taking
the young girls and they became the recyclers and the
entrepreneurs and they started actually selling those metro pads and
making their own money. Then we started getting to young boys,
the same middle school boys we had them working and
so that they understood. So it wasn't now it's an economy,
(28:03):
it's an economic thing. It's not again the stigmatization in
a way, right, that has been a super popular program.
Tens of thousands of young girls have now been able
to remain in school and have an entrepreneurial item that
they are selling, that they're educating and selling. And so
that was another one that just came from us sort
of being in the school hygiene and then figuring out
(28:25):
another thing to do huge.
Speaker 1 (28:27):
Well, you're finding these problems that can be solved and
just through something like recycling. I mean, you are very inspiring.
It just it makes me so happy that you've done
this from one idea to worldwide service, and it's amazing
as someone who's been doing this for seventeen years. What
(28:48):
is the advice that you would give to somebody who
has an idea like this, what's the first thing you
would tell them.
Speaker 2 (28:55):
I get to speak to people around the world. I
get the lecture universities around the world, and I always
tell people when you're trying to do something good, when
you're trying to do something that makes the world a
better place, I think the stars are going to align
for you at some point. I think, you know, whether
you're spiritual or lot of spiritual, something right's gonna happen.
You're going to get the break you need. And we
ended up getting that break. You're probably going to run
(29:16):
into some additional challenging moments when you're trying to do
something that's impact driven, that does it sometimes have clear
cut business models that sometimes relies on people to pay
for because they want to do the right thing, or
because they're supposed to do the right thing for the
environment or for social impact. It's just actually at FSU
lecturing a couple of weeks ago, they're the only college
(29:38):
in the country that has a major, a minor, and
a grad program in social entrepreneurship. So this is what
I told them. I said, listen, find your why, and
when you find it, just go go go. You relentless,
have urgency. You may have to pivot, you may have
to iterate. We had to do that a lot. It's okay.
(29:58):
But when you've got that hardware and that's tied to
your why, to your purpose, the stars will align. Something's
going to happen right, and it's going to work out well.
Speaker 1 (30:08):
It's certainly worked out for Clean the World. I mean, wow, Sean,
I mean, tell me more about where Clean the World
has gone. Tell me about your global operations.
Speaker 2 (30:19):
So the WASH Foundation is our five P'T one C
three that does all of our distribution and our impact work.
And so there's two really main primary channels. One is
we do work on the ground in Uganda right now.
We've employees there, staff there in the Dominican Republic where
we have a number of schools that we work with,
and some work in the Philippines, Southeast Asia that comes
(30:40):
out of our Hong Kong office. So we have our
on the ground washing schools, We're doing our Washington clinics,
We're doing our menstrual hygiene all that stuff. But then
in addition, we work with a bunch of other NGOs.
So NGO's like Children's International World, Vision of Floating Doctors,
Operation of Christmas Child, It's American's Purse. They have wash programs,
(31:01):
they have a lot of you know, they're doing water
wells and other sanitation and hygiene work. And so they
will literally just back truckload empty truckloads up to our
facility and we just load truckloads of soap in for them.
So that they can they could take it out. So
we're supporting NGOs and their work, and then we have
our own work on the ground that we do ourselves well.
Speaker 1 (31:21):
Sean, you are incredible. I'm excited and I hear stuff
like this and I think to myself, Okay, you need
to get your life together and start looking around you
at what you can do better. So for the listeners
who are hearing this and feeling inspired by you, what
can they do to become part of the Clean the
(31:43):
World ripple?
Speaker 2 (31:44):
Number One, when you're checking out of that hotel, ask
them do they recycle their soap in plastic with Clean
the World? Number two? You can go to the Washfoundation
dot org. That's our five oh one C three and
they can donate, they can support there. We also have
volunteer centers in Orlando, in Vegas and Amsterdam, So if
they're in those cities and they want to come out
and volunteer and help, they can. Let me say this,
(32:08):
the world needs a lot of help right now. There's
a lot of things that we need, and I think
one thing that we can all agree on is that
government's not going to solve our problems. They're just not
going to and you know, nonprofits just don't have enough capital,
enough money in order to solve our problems. Right, this
is going to come out of private corporations. This is
(32:30):
going to come out of employees who work at companies,
who let their companies know that they're very interested in
social impact and volunteer opportunities and making the world a
better place. And so like, it doesn't matter what it is.
If you're feeling inspired, what you've got to do is
take that step to helping somebody out. Go to your
(32:51):
local food pantry, go to your local animal shelter, go
to your local you know, whatever is the thing, the
big brother, big sister, you know, whatever it is. There
are so many opportunities in your local community that you
can help serve and love somebody. You know, I give
a whole keynote on the whole love your neighbor and
what that means, and just just go love somebody right
(33:13):
at your company. What are they doing in order to
drive social impact and volunteer opportunities and how are they
making the world a better place? And can you help
them drive that? Can you get involved there? And I
just feel like if you get involved in those things locally,
love to have you involve a clean the world? The
Wash Foundation, we love it, but there are millions of
charities and organizations that need help and support, and if
(33:33):
you get involved there, you'll find your passionate thing, you'll
find your why, and somewhere in there you'll be in
your own hotel room and you'll see your bar of
soap being thrown away and need to figure out what
to do with it, and then your ripple effect will
will be born. So that next step is, go volunteer,
Go get involved with someone, Go do something to make
(33:54):
the world a better place. I get you've got to
take desire and it's got to turn into action. And
I think once you start doing that, you'll also be
surprised how much it serves you and your own feelings
and your own self esteem and your own confidence and
it all again. I got a whole keynote on the
whole thing, But psychologically it makes a huge amount of
(34:15):
difference when you're helping others, for sure.
Speaker 1 (34:18):
Like a straight shot of happiness. I gotta be honest,
I'm fired up. Let's go do some good everybody. Sean,
I want to say thank you so much for taking
time out of your day to talk to us because
you're doing amazing things and I'm excited about it, and
I just want to say a huge thank you.
Speaker 2 (34:33):
Yeah, it's my pleasure. Thank you so much for having
us on giving us this platform, and you're awesome. We
appreciate it, and thank you.
Speaker 1 (34:42):
Well, that was awesome. Yes, it was awesome. Sean is amazing,
and I feel like if we could just have a
few more people like him around, things would get really great,
really fast. We just need more of us asking these
questions and then following through. And also, who's going to
look at hotel soap the same way? Again, I'm not.
(35:02):
I hope you enjoyed the episode, and I hope you
really took something from it. If you want to get involved,
We're gonna have all of the clean the World information available.
It's all gonna be in the show notes, so please
check that out. I have really high hopes for the show.
I really want people to listen to this and have
a fun time listening to it and then go like wow,
(35:23):
I feel better because I genuinely think if we could
have just a little bit less anxiety, if we just
have a little more clarity to our thoughts, maybe when
you know you drive home later you'd be a little
less road rageye, or maybe a little less quick to judge.
I don't want to be one of those inspirational coaches.
I don't because I always make fun of those guys,
all right, They're a little cheesy, a little corny, and
(35:44):
I like making fun of it. But at the end
of the day, I do want you guys to have
something that's good and fun and entertaining. So please, I
want to hear from you. What are your thoughts on this?
Are you up to something that maybe you want to
share with us? Please, I want to know about it.
You can use the hashtag ripple Effect and we will
see all of that, and then you can also tag
(36:05):
me at Jenakim Jones on Instagram and on TikTok and
maybe we can connect and talk about cool things that
we want to do together. I think that would be amazing,
So make sure you do that. Send us everything hashtag
ripple Effect. And of course we'll be back with a
new episode, and this next one, it's a Doozy. We
head out to some of the world disaster zones all
(36:26):
around the world and meet the tough and dedicated people
that volunteer to clean up prepare for the next one.
And also they do give out a lot of hugs.
They're tough guys and gals, but boy do they have
a soft spot and I love it, so don't forget
to join us.
Hey there, I'm Jenni Kim Jones. This is The Ripple Effect,
and this is our first episode, and this is the
first of many stories that I hope will convince you that,
you guys, humanity is not just a total dumpster fire. Okay,
it's not. There are great people in the world, and
this show is going to show you regular old people
like you and me. And they took something small, this
(00:25):
tiny thing, and made a massive impact and I can't
wait to tell you about it. That's really what we
mean by the ripple Effect. You know, let me give
you an example. I make one decision, like I compliment
someone on their outfit, and then that person's feeling good,
so they decide to open the door for someone else
who is maybe rushing to a job interview. And then
that person's like, hey, they held the door for me.
(00:46):
If they got some confidence, then they do well in
that interview and bam, they get the job. That's what
we're talking about. Just that small little decision, one decision
that brings you closer to someone else, can change the
way someone's day goes. Heck, change the way their life goes.
And that's what we want here. We want more human connection.
(01:10):
But before we meet our first interview today and we
tell you this incredible story, I feel like maybe I
should introduce myself. Maybe some of you know me already,
maybe you don't. I am Jenik Kim Jones, and I'm
a stand up comedian. That's what I do. It's always
awkward when you tell people you're a stand up comedian
because then immediately they're like, oh yeah, tell me a joke,
(01:30):
and I'm like, okay, calm down. But what's cool about
my job is that I travel all over the place.
I have been to every town, every weird place you
can imagine, I've probably been there. And that's actually one
of the things I love the most is because I
go to all these places and I meet so many people,
and I love learning about their way of life. You know,
every town has a different vibe, different energy, something they
(01:52):
really care about. But you know it's really wild is
in all of these places, I will tell jokes and
oftentimes the same jokes to differ from people, and they'll laugh.
Because we relate to each other in a lot more
ways than I think we realize. We have so much
in common, even when it seems like we have absolutely
nothing in common. The cool thing about comedy is that
(02:15):
it's little by little. Okay. So when I first started
open mics in New York City and there were maybe, like,
I don't know, four people there, and three of them
were stand up comedians also trying to tell jokes. You know,
you start out and you're not good at it, and
it's awkward, and you tell a joke and nobody laughs,
and it's just so painful, and you think, why am
I doing this? But then something in your heart goes, no,
(02:37):
you can do this. You have to do this. That's
what it was like for me. I was starting out.
I'm like, why am I not? What does this so hard?
And then something happens. You get a little laugh, right,
and I remember you, guys, I remember some of my
early jokes. Okay, so here's one.
Speaker 2 (02:53):
All right.
Speaker 1 (02:54):
The joke was I saw a girl. She was wearing
a shirt that said I only date vampires sorry, and
I thought, oh my goodness, that is such a creative
way to tell people you never date. Okay, that joke
killed Twilight was a big deal, so keep that in mind.
Everybody was into the vampire movies. Okay. I remember another
early joke. I used to say, you know, when I'm
(03:15):
not doing stand up comedy, I'm a stay at home mom.
I wear the yoga pants in the family, but I
never do yoga in them. Ever, so dumb. These are
the early jokes I was telling, and I was getting
laugh by laugh and just little by little. And what
was cool is it slowly rippled into something more where
I could turn it into a career where I did
(03:36):
a show a few months ago where I had a
thousand people and we were all laughing. It was great.
And that's where it ties in to the ripple. Okay,
the ripple effect is here. You see what I did there.
It's called branding. All right, we are the ripple effect.
We're creating ripples all over the place in our lives now.
When I got a call about this podcast, it was
a little spooky, I'm gonna be honest, because I had
(03:56):
said to my husband just a couple of weeks before that,
I was just so frustrated with social media. I didn't
like what it was doing to me. I'm hearing bad
news all the time. I'm seeing all these things in
my life that are like making me jealous. I'm not
a jealous person. I want everybody to be happy. I
know there's good news out there, but nobody's talking about
it because they just want stuff to go viral and
(04:18):
everybody to fight. And then I got a call and
they're like, hey, do you want to make a podcast
about good people doing good things, putting good into the world.
And I'm like, wait, yes, yes, I really really do.
That sounds amazing. So if you've concluded that there's nothing
good that can come out of picking up your phone
one more time, but you also like, can't not pick
(04:41):
up your phone because it's important and we use it
for everything, please consider the ripple effect. You're safe haven. Okay,
we are your inner circle. You can trust us. Today
we're gonna be talking about soap. Okay, maybe I built
that up like a little bit too much because it's soap,
and you're thinking, what I'm underselling it right now? All right,
(05:03):
because this episode, let's get real, it's not just soap.
It's obviously a lot bigger than that. As a comedian,
I travel all the time. I'm out at shows, I
shake a lot of people's hands. I come back to
my hotel. I use the soap. I travel all day.
I use the soap. We use it in the hotel
room and then we just leave it behind. I do.
I don't take it with me. There's just you know,
(05:24):
I use the bar of soap, I leave it there,
or I use a little bit of bodywash, I leave
it there. And I can't believe how much waste that
is if you really think about it, because what do
they do with that soap? There's like islands made out
of trash floating in the ocean. That is so much trash.
I care about that. That seems like a lot. Well,
our guest today, Sean Seipler, turns out he also thought
(05:47):
a lot about soap. And instead of shrugging it off
in his hotel room like I would and just turning
on Shark Tank and reruns of Gilmore Girls, which is
my favorite thing to watch in hotel rooms, he actually
did something. He started an organization called Clean the World.
And you have never heard a better origin story, by
(06:08):
the way. Okay, it has everything from cooking suspicious things
in garages to having his whole family involved. And you
know what's wild, This crazy idea worked. Today. Sean's doing
so much more than just recycling old soap, And we're
going to get into all of those soapy Ripley ways
that he took his idea and gave it a life
of its own, changing lives all over the world. And
(06:31):
at the end of our conversation, we have ways for
you to get in on those good feelings that we've
got going on here at the Ripple Effect, So please
stick around. It has been so great to get to
know you a little bit, and I know that we're
gonna have a great time this season, and I am
so excited, and I can go on and on. I
could talk forever, I really could, but honestly, I feel
like we'd probably hear from you about that. So I'm
(06:52):
gonna stop talking so much right this second, and without
further ado, I'm going to introduce our guest, Sean Zeipler
from Clean in the World. Sean, it's so great to
have you here.
Speaker 2 (07:06):
It's great to be had here, Jenna. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1 (07:09):
Oh good, excellent. I'm so happy you're here. I'm so
excited to talk to you. And I know that you've
told your story before, but I can't wait to hear
it because I know a lot about you and Clean
the World, and I think what you guys are doing
is amazing. So first of all, Sean. I think we
need to start with the obvious question here. Okay, you
(07:30):
are the guy that asked, what in the world happens
to all this hotel soap?
Speaker 2 (07:35):
That's you, right, that's right.
Speaker 1 (07:37):
How did you come to that question? Because I'm not
sure a lot of people have asked that question.
Speaker 2 (07:42):
That's a great question to ask. So seventeen years ago,
I was running a global sales team for a technology company,
and I was on the road four nights a week,
and there was something inside of me. It's the entrepreneur
that goes back to when my first lemonadees fan when
I was eight years old, that wanted to start my
own business. I wanted to do my own thing, and
(08:03):
I thought at the time that I wanted to do
something in sustainability or green energy or something along those lines. Really,
as an entrepreneur, thinking about seventeen years ago, what would
be you know, So I'm looking at solar panels and
wind turbines and you know, all these various things, and
I'm just thinking about items of waste. And so one
(08:23):
night I'm in a hotel room in Minneapolis. Now, my
two accounts in Minneapolis were Best Buy and Target. They
were the two biggest accounts for the company. So I
was in Minneapolis forty nights a year. Now, I am
a thin blooded South Floridian who when I travel to Minneapolis,
I feel like I have to survive, you know, like
(08:43):
I just got to get through the night. Yes, I
would bundle up in my hotel room and I'd have
cocktails and that's what would get me through the night.
And so one of those nights, a couple of cocktails
in hand, I started thinking about what happened to the
little bar soap and the little bottle shampoo when I
was done using it? What did the hotel do with it?
And so I called the front desk and asked what
happened to the soap in the shampoo when I was
(09:04):
done with it? And they chuckled and said, Sean, why
don't you have another cocktail? And I said, that's a
great idea, send one up. But know really, what happens
with the soap what I'm done? They said, we throw
it away. I said, okay. So I went to my
laptop right there and there, and I did some quick googling.
And at that time, there were four point six million
hotel rooms in the US. There was an average occupancy
(09:27):
rate of sixty percent, you know, there was an average
night and stay of like one point two. And so
I did this like back of envelope math, and I said,
if hotels are throwing their soap away, we're throwing away
a million bars of soap every day out of hotels
across the US, and a couple million bars of soap
out of hotels across the globe. So I found a study,
and then a second study at a third stay. I
(09:49):
end up finding about nine studies. I can remember the
night that I was on my bed. I had those
studies all laid out in front of me, and they
all said the exact same thing. At that time, in
two thousand and nine, there were nine thousand children under
the age of five that were dying every day to
pneumonia and diar real disease and number one and number
two leading cause of death amongst children worldwide, five and
a half million children a year. And all these studies
(10:11):
showed that if we just gave them soap and taught
them how and when to wash their hands, that we
could cut those deaths in half. And so that was
my AHA moment, the moment that I said, okay, there's
something here. I'm going to figure out how to get
the soap from hotels, recycle it, and get it in
the hands of those children and families around the world who,
in so many cases were literally dying because of a
(10:33):
lack of ig.
Speaker 1 (10:34):
Oh my goodness. Okay, so you found the purpose, you
found the why. I'd love to know what was day
one at clean the world versus what does it look
like right now?
Speaker 2 (10:44):
So two thousand and nine, so I am having to
be half German and half Puerto Rican. So I called
my German family members who happened to have all the
money in the family, and I said, hey, I got
this great idea. I'm going to collect soap from motels.
I'm going to recycle it, send it people around the world.
I need your money. Can you support me and all
my germ foumidly said no. They said that's dumb. I
get the day job. We're not going to do that.
(11:05):
So I switched my kitchen up a little bit. I
went to my Puerto Rican family members a little crazier,
and I said, listen, I got this great idea. We're
gonna get together. We're going to take soap from hotels,
recycle it and send it to children around the world
to save their lives. And all my Puerto Rican found
members said, we are in so we got ourselves, myself,
my cousin, my uncle. We all show up in a
(11:25):
single car garage. We're all sitting around on upside down
pickle buckets with potato peelers. We're collecting soap from hotel
across Orlando. We're scraping the outside of the bars of
soap with the potato peelers to surface clean it. We
then have a meat grinder and so one of us
is on the meat grinder grinding the soap up into
a noodle. And we have a table with four ken
(11:45):
more cookers on it, and then that's where we're cooking
that soap into a paste. So I would cook for
about two hours, get all the impurities cooked out of it,
turn it into a paste. After it was done cooking,
put more wax paper top it, clamp it. It would
dry overnight. We had a fan blowing the soap drive.
The power would cut in the house every like thirty minutes,
which was a big deal because that's when the salsa
(12:07):
and the merangue stopped playing. And with my Puerto Rican workforce.
It wasn't get paid a lot of money. The music
had to be playing, so when the music stopped working,
stop so we had to figure out when you could
have a meat grinder on and the cookers and all that.
And true story, the first time that the police came
by the garage, they wanted to see what we were
cooking in that garage.
Speaker 1 (12:27):
Of course they did showed up like what kind of
breaking bad situation is happening in this garage?
Speaker 2 (12:33):
Breaking Bad was top of the charts that year, by
the way, so it was very apropos for what was
going on new culture. And so that's how we launched.
And we made five hundred bars of soap a day.
We grinded it in a single car garage. And as
I just fast forward you to today, we have almost
ten thousand hotels that operate our soap and plastic recycling program.
(12:58):
We have offices in Orlando, Las VEGASUS, Montreal, Puttakana, Amsterdam,
Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, Taiwan. We operate all across Europe,
the US. We have diverted over thirty million pounds of
waste from landfill and we have created and distributed ninety
million free bars of soap to children, families, mothers in
(13:20):
one hundred and twenty seven countries across the globe, and
the biggest, the best at of all is that the
death rate to children under the age of five dying
to hydro related illnesses has decreased by more than sixty
percent since the day we started. And the United Nations
was so impressed with our work that our nonprofit, the
Wash Foundation, they actually put us on the United Nations
(13:41):
Global Wash Cluster, and so we actually have a seat
at the UN General Assembly because of the work that
we've done, which started seventeen years ago with a bunch
of Puerto Ricans cooking soap in a garage.
Speaker 1 (13:51):
With the police coming by, Like this smells really interesting.
What do you guys do? I mean the aroma of
all that soap? Okay, So, I'm in hotel rooms all
the time too. I'm a comedian. I have a lot
of ideas alone in a hotel room, and I'm gonna
be honest, not one of them has left the hotel
room and even made it to the free breakfast in
the lobby. Okay. So the fact that you took this
(14:14):
idea because it sounds like it wasn't easy. How did
you keep going? It would be very easy for someone
to say, this is too hard? So what made you go?
I can't stop.
Speaker 2 (14:27):
Jennet, that's an awesome question. I'm getting emotional as you
ask because of this moment. When we did our first
trip to Haiti in July of nine. We fly in
on a Wednesday, July first of nine. I'm on a
DC three airplane flying over the Bermuda Triangle. This plane's
been built in the nineteen forties. The pilots are actually
(14:50):
playing with me a little bit going over the Bebitter Triangle,
going oh, our instruments are not working anymore, and I'm like, Gods,
I'm not funny, not funny at all. We get to
the capation is the northern part of Haiti. We land.
We had to circle the runway once because there's a
cow on the runway. Cow gets off the runway. We land.
They say we're going to a church and that's the
(15:10):
first place we're going. We've got like two thousand bars
of soap that we have been making in the garage.
We load up a van immediately. When I get out,
there's just a lot of need. There's a lot of
people around. It's chaos. As a frequent traveler, that was
a shorter airplane flight for me from Fort Myers, Florida
to go there that it is for me to go
to Washington, d C. So it's a stone's throwaway from
(15:34):
where I live to come into this sectreat poverty. Right.
So then we come into the back of this building,
which is this massive church. It's an open air church
because in Haiti, when you put a roof on your building,
you have to start paying taxes. So what everyone does
is they build their first level and then they build
the like for the second level, they just sort of
put the columns up and they never put the roof
(15:57):
on it so that they don't pay taxes, and so
all structures are like that. So I come in and
there are ten thousand people in this church. Oh my gosh,
and we've got two thousand bars of soap, and my
logical mind, you know, is going on. This is unreal.
We're not gonna be able to help, and I can
be able to help. There's a pastor speaking in Creole.
There's an interpreter. He starts describing what happens when a
(16:19):
child gets direal disease and how the stomach starts cramping,
and how they start to vomit, and how they start
to they dehydrate, and how they start to shrivel. And
this is what happens when they had diaryl Jase and
they pass and he says, if you've experienced that, please
come up here. And fifty women come walking up on
(16:40):
stage and start telling their stories. And I buried one child,
and I had my daughter and I didn't know what
to do, and I went to the priest, and I
went to the voodoo doctor, and I went to the
had nothing to do. I didn't know what to do,
and she died. And so one mother after another after
another is telling me about the one and the two
and the three children that they that died that they
(17:02):
had to bury, and it just hit heavy in the heart,
and I'm like, it doesn't matter what comes my way.
I'm going to figure out how to help these women.
I'm going to figure out how to get soap into
the hands of these people. And this is a tragedy.
This is not fair. We're throwing away million bars of
soap every day, and all they need is soap to
(17:24):
not have to bury their children. And so that was
the moment for me that was like, we're going to
keep fighting and fighting and fighting huge.
Speaker 1 (17:33):
I have four kids as well. I think you mentioned
you had four kids and there's just nothing. You have
five now, Oh my goodness, that's amazing. It's getting me
emotional because I can't imagine going through that for something
that I take for granted. I mean, soap, I have it,
I need to use it. I have to often remind
(17:54):
my children to use it. But I'm grateful for you.
I'm just going to tell you right now.
Speaker 2 (17:59):
Thank you. I appreciate that. I appreciate that emotion too,
and I feel that you know from me, and that's
that's it, and that's my You know, as I speak
to people again around the world, it's like whatever kind
of breaks your heart, whatever whatever gets you. You know,
you're talking about the ripple effect, I mean whatever is that? Yeah,
that just you become passionate about you become go for it,
because we need a lot of that to happen to
(18:20):
make this world a better place. You know, we need
our hearts to break over things for us to go
figure out those awesome solutions to make a difference that's right.
Speaker 1 (18:27):
To solve a problem. These problems you're solving are massive. Okay,
I just want to remind some of us, like about
the numbers you've given, because again, we started in a
garage and now we're like changing lives all over the world.
You said, ninety million bars of soap.
Speaker 2 (18:42):
Ninety million free bars of soap have been distributed to
those in need around the world, locally and across the globe.
Speaker 1 (18:48):
Okay, So how did you go to the hotels then, Like,
how was that process of saying, hey, do you want
to do something great?
Speaker 2 (18:55):
Is that?
Speaker 1 (18:55):
I mean, how did you get them to be involved?
Because you you have thousands of hotels?
Speaker 2 (18:59):
You said, that's that's right, Well we do today. Going
back seventeen years ago, the first hotels in central Florida
we went to We said, hey, we'll take your soap,
we'll take your plastic, we'll do it for free. Just
give it to us, and we'll get donations and we'll
get grants and we'll go figure out how to get
the money. Okay, Well that didn't work. As a matter
(19:19):
of fact, we went Brooke, Oh my goodness. We did
not receive grants, we did not receive donations, and I
personally went from a guy in his early thirties, with
tens of thousand stock options, two homes, the biggest seven
to fifty on the block to losing a home. My
wife's car got repossessed. The electricity was cutting my house
at one point. I mean we went I went through
(19:40):
all the kids' college funds, all the four one K
through the whole thing. So it forced us to have
to figure out a business model, and many months into it,
I said, listen, we're providing a value to hotels. The
hotels are getting a program that reduces landfill waste, it
helps them save lives. We're sending the soap back to
(20:01):
the countries where many of the housekeepers and the room
attendants are from and actually are sending money back to.
So we're sending the soap to Haiti in New Mexico
and Guatemala, and these are where the housekeepers are from.
So this is really like a human resource program, right.
This is one that the room intendants can feel proud
of and it can feel really good about that their
hotels are doing it. So I kind of bundled up
(20:23):
all that value and I went back to the hotels
and I said, listen, I think you should pay for
this program. I think this is a recycling program that
just like you pay somebody to take your trash away,
I think you should pay me to take your soap
in your plastic away. And so when I first went
to them with that proposition in two thousand and nine,
when the economy was really bad, they all said no,
(20:43):
they said we're not going to do that. And I said, okay,
so we're having a problem here. We were starting to
really go under. So what happened is our local Fox
thirty five they wanted to do a piece on us,
and they went with us to Haiti on our first distribution,
and so they documented and it did a nice, a
wonderful news piece on us distributing in CAPATIONI, Haiti. And
(21:05):
that news piece ran on the local Fox Orlando thirty five,
and then it ran on a couple of other Fox
stations across the US, and it just so happened to
run in New York the night that Katie Kurk, who
was doing CBS Evening News that her senior producer, was
watching the local Fox at night and saw the piece
on us.
Speaker 3 (21:24):
Thousands of Haitians celebrate their faith, but it's a worldly
offering that sets off a scramble, not for free food
or medicine, but soap precious here. It would have been
trash in the United States if not for Sean Zeipler.
Speaker 2 (21:42):
And so all of a sudden, I get a call
on the phone from Katie Kirk, senior producer and at
the time, the H one N one flew virus was
happening across the US, and they said, we want to
do a piece on you guys because we liked the
concept of washing your hands during the H one N
law and we want to go to Haiti, so we
want to start in the hotel and see the recycling. Now,
(22:04):
by the way, I'm still in the garage when I'm
taking this call, so they're like, you know, can we
come down and see your foting.
Speaker 1 (22:09):
Can you turn the music down please, we can't hear you.
Speaker 2 (22:12):
They're like, yeah, but yo, you can definitely come to
our facility. We'd love to host you at our our
magnific Sylvie out there. And so at that time I
was talking to the Peabody Hotel here in Orlando, and
I called the Peabody right after CBS calls me. I said, listen,
I have an opportunity to put you on CBS Evening News.
But in order to do that, I need you to
(22:32):
buy my program, and I need you to shout from
the mountaintop. So this is the greatest thing that you've
ever paid for, And so they agreed. The first rate
was forty cents per room per month, so they had
about a nine hundred room hotel, so they were paying
three hundred and fifty seven dollars a month. And I
remember when I got the check in the first check
(22:54):
from the Peabody and just starting to cry. But it
was like, if I could get one, I can get
them all. And at that point we did the CBS
Eating News piece. It was a huge success. The phone
started ringing off the hooks and they never stopped ringing
after that. And you know, people at that time wanted
to help Adie, they wanted to get involved, So that
(23:14):
is really what turned it for us. And then hotels
started paying and so now we have does ten thousand
hotels actually pay us to recycle all their soap and
they're plastic.
Speaker 1 (23:23):
Honestly, I feel like, you know, my next podcast is
just going to have to be like a deep dive
on your logistics, because it seems like it's so much yes,
that's right, it got to be so intense. Let's go
back to that first trip in Haiti. So you are
in Haiti and you have these two thousand bars of soap.
It's your first trip, right, and you're seeing this and
(23:45):
you've handed out soap. And then months later you're back again,
right because of the earthquake. Are there any specific moments
or people we're talking here, Like you mentioned about the
ripple effect, did you see any of your ripples take effect? Yeah?
Speaker 2 (23:59):
Yeah, you know, after that first trip to Haiti, I
made a commitment that I'm going to get as much
soap into this region in Haiti as I possibly can.
And so since that time, we've said about three million
bars of soap, wow, of the ninety three million just
into that portion of Haiti. I've been there several times
to the Evangelical Church of Haiti. We did see a
(24:20):
lot of kids that we started off, you know, in nine,
and we saw them in ten and eleven and twelve,
even some orphanages that we supported. They were healthy, they
understood you know, proper hygiene, and they were educating others
as well. If you remember what I kind of went
through those studies. It was the soap, but it was
also learning how lid to wash your hands. I mean,
(24:40):
there's been many schools that we've gone back to. We've
put a ton of posters in these schools and hand
washing stations and a lot of great work there. And
we're doing a ton right now in the Dominican Republic,
same piece of land, Little Louis or access right now.
It's tough right now into Haiti. We're actually not going
into Haiti right now because of the you know, the
turbulence of the violence. Right but Eighti's just been a unfortunately,
(25:03):
it's just a tough place to continue to work in
right now.
Speaker 1 (25:07):
Yeah, you said you had offices all over the world.
This is a world truly clean the world is what's
so cool. And I noticed your shirt. It says what
does your shirt say?
Speaker 2 (25:18):
Tell us all wash your hands, bro? Can you see it?
Speaker 1 (25:21):
Wash your hands?
Speaker 3 (25:22):
Bro?
Speaker 2 (25:23):
Yes?
Speaker 1 (25:25):
And that's your slogan, right, that's your out there educating
people and telling everybody, hey, wash your hands.
Speaker 2 (25:31):
Without a doubt. So we have a program called Washington Schools. Okay,
So we've done this program in Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, in
Dominican Republic and so and we did this in the
early days in Haiti, and so we go into a
district where there are multiple school children and we teach
them how in to wash their hands, and when they
demonstrate that they know how to wash their hands, we
(25:54):
give them soap that they can use at school, but
that they can also take home to the family. So
the treat there is that they gets something to take
them to the family. Now, before we do all that,
we baseline tests and study cases of diar real disease,
cases of pneumonia, school attendance. So we get all this
baseline data. Then we take them through our program and
(26:14):
then we check them it ninety days, at six months
and at twelve months. Okay, across the board, fifty five
percent reduction in diar real disease pneumonia cases. And here's
the best part, well one of the best parts, fifty
percent increase in school attendance because now they're going to
school because they're not sick and so they're getting edge healthy.
(26:37):
They're healthy. So then let me give you another ripple.
Then we're in these schools and we start doing it
in kindergarten, in third grade and fourth feber Do elementary,
then we start going into middle school, and we start
noticing that young girls I have four daughters, that they
are dropping out of school at the time that their
menstrual cycle starts, and why because they don't have proper
(27:00):
hygiene products. They are stigmatized. And that's basically the time
that they get out of being educated. And the other
thing that happens is the boys then continue to get educated,
and then once they get educated, they leave the community
because they're educated and they want to get out and
they want to go right. So we said, now we're
not going to do that. This this father of four daughters,
(27:21):
it's not going to have that aage. And here's what
we started doing. We started in the realm of recycling.
We were able to make sustainable, recyclable menstrual pads and
hygie products. So we were able to take products that
were being discarded, bring them in, clean them, and turn
them into pads. And so we did a number of things.
(27:42):
Number one is we destigmatized through education. We started taking
the young girls and they became the recyclers and the
entrepreneurs and they started actually selling those metro pads and
making their own money. Then we started getting to young boys,
the same middle school boys we had them working and
so that they understood. So it wasn't now it's an economy,
(28:03):
it's an economic thing. It's not again the stigmatization in
a way, right, that has been a super popular program.
Tens of thousands of young girls have now been able
to remain in school and have an entrepreneurial item that
they are selling, that they're educating and selling. And so
that was another one that just came from us sort
of being in the school hygiene and then figuring out
(28:25):
another thing to do huge.
Speaker 1 (28:27):
Well, you're finding these problems that can be solved and
just through something like recycling. I mean, you are very inspiring.
It just it makes me so happy that you've done
this from one idea to worldwide service, and it's amazing
as someone who's been doing this for seventeen years. What
(28:48):
is the advice that you would give to somebody who
has an idea like this, what's the first thing you
would tell them.
Speaker 2 (28:55):
I get to speak to people around the world. I
get the lecture universities around the world, and I always
tell people when you're trying to do something good, when
you're trying to do something that makes the world a
better place, I think the stars are going to align
for you at some point. I think, you know, whether
you're spiritual or lot of spiritual, something right's gonna happen.
You're going to get the break you need. And we
ended up getting that break. You're probably going to run
(29:16):
into some additional challenging moments when you're trying to do
something that's impact driven, that does it sometimes have clear
cut business models that sometimes relies on people to pay
for because they want to do the right thing, or
because they're supposed to do the right thing for the
environment or for social impact. It's just actually at FSU
lecturing a couple of weeks ago, they're the only college
(29:38):
in the country that has a major, a minor, and
a grad program in social entrepreneurship. So this is what
I told them. I said, listen, find your why, and
when you find it, just go go go. You relentless,
have urgency. You may have to pivot, you may have
to iterate. We had to do that a lot. It's okay.
(29:58):
But when you've got that hardware and that's tied to
your why, to your purpose, the stars will align. Something's
going to happen right, and it's going to work out well.
Speaker 1 (30:08):
It's certainly worked out for Clean the World. I mean, wow, Sean,
I mean, tell me more about where Clean the World
has gone. Tell me about your global operations.
Speaker 2 (30:19):
So the WASH Foundation is our five P'T one C
three that does all of our distribution and our impact work.
And so there's two really main primary channels. One is
we do work on the ground in Uganda right now.
We've employees there, staff there in the Dominican Republic where
we have a number of schools that we work with,
and some work in the Philippines, Southeast Asia that comes
(30:40):
out of our Hong Kong office. So we have our
on the ground washing schools, We're doing our Washington clinics,
We're doing our menstrual hygiene all that stuff. But then
in addition, we work with a bunch of other NGOs.
So NGO's like Children's International World, Vision of Floating Doctors,
Operation of Christmas Child, It's American's Purse. They have wash programs,
(31:01):
they have a lot of you know, they're doing water
wells and other sanitation and hygiene work. And so they
will literally just back truckload empty truckloads up to our
facility and we just load truckloads of soap in for them.
So that they can they could take it out. So
we're supporting NGOs and their work, and then we have
our own work on the ground that we do ourselves well.
Speaker 1 (31:21):
Sean, you are incredible. I'm excited and I hear stuff
like this and I think to myself, Okay, you need
to get your life together and start looking around you
at what you can do better. So for the listeners
who are hearing this and feeling inspired by you, what
can they do to become part of the Clean the
(31:43):
World ripple?
Speaker 2 (31:44):
Number One, when you're checking out of that hotel, ask
them do they recycle their soap in plastic with Clean
the World? Number two? You can go to the Washfoundation
dot org. That's our five oh one C three and
they can donate, they can support there. We also have
volunteer centers in Orlando, in Vegas and Amsterdam, So if
they're in those cities and they want to come out
and volunteer and help, they can. Let me say this,
(32:08):
the world needs a lot of help right now. There's
a lot of things that we need, and I think
one thing that we can all agree on is that
government's not going to solve our problems. They're just not
going to and you know, nonprofits just don't have enough capital,
enough money in order to solve our problems. Right, this
is going to come out of private corporations. This is
(32:30):
going to come out of employees who work at companies,
who let their companies know that they're very interested in
social impact and volunteer opportunities and making the world a
better place. And so like, it doesn't matter what it is.
If you're feeling inspired, what you've got to do is
take that step to helping somebody out. Go to your
(32:51):
local food pantry, go to your local animal shelter, go
to your local you know, whatever is the thing, the
big brother, big sister, you know, whatever it is. There
are so many opportunities in your local community that you
can help serve and love somebody. You know, I give
a whole keynote on the whole love your neighbor and
what that means, and just just go love somebody right
(33:13):
at your company. What are they doing in order to
drive social impact and volunteer opportunities and how are they
making the world a better place? And can you help
them drive that? Can you get involved there? And I
just feel like if you get involved in those things locally,
love to have you involve a clean the world? The
Wash Foundation, we love it, but there are millions of
charities and organizations that need help and support, and if
(33:33):
you get involved there, you'll find your passionate thing, you'll
find your why, and somewhere in there you'll be in
your own hotel room and you'll see your bar of
soap being thrown away and need to figure out what
to do with it, and then your ripple effect will
will be born. So that next step is, go volunteer,
Go get involved with someone, Go do something to make
(33:54):
the world a better place. I get you've got to
take desire and it's got to turn into action. And
I think once you start doing that, you'll also be
surprised how much it serves you and your own feelings
and your own self esteem and your own confidence and
it all again. I got a whole keynote on the
whole thing, But psychologically it makes a huge amount of
(34:15):
difference when you're helping others, for sure.
Speaker 1 (34:18):
Like a straight shot of happiness. I gotta be honest,
I'm fired up. Let's go do some good everybody. Sean,
I want to say thank you so much for taking
time out of your day to talk to us because
you're doing amazing things and I'm excited about it, and
I just want to say a huge thank you.
Speaker 2 (34:33):
Yeah, it's my pleasure. Thank you so much for having
us on giving us this platform, and you're awesome. We
appreciate it, and thank you.
Speaker 1 (34:42):
Well, that was awesome. Yes, it was awesome. Sean is amazing,
and I feel like if we could just have a
few more people like him around, things would get really great,
really fast. We just need more of us asking these
questions and then following through. And also, who's going to
look at hotel soap the same way? Again, I'm not.
(35:02):
I hope you enjoyed the episode, and I hope you
really took something from it. If you want to get involved,
We're gonna have all of the clean the World information available.
It's all gonna be in the show notes, so please
check that out. I have really high hopes for the show.
I really want people to listen to this and have
a fun time listening to it and then go like wow,
(35:23):
I feel better because I genuinely think if we could
have just a little bit less anxiety, if we just
have a little more clarity to our thoughts, maybe when
you know you drive home later you'd be a little
less road rageye, or maybe a little less quick to judge.
I don't want to be one of those inspirational coaches.
I don't because I always make fun of those guys,
all right, They're a little cheesy, a little corny, and
(35:44):
I like making fun of it. But at the end
of the day, I do want you guys to have
something that's good and fun and entertaining. So please, I
want to hear from you. What are your thoughts on this?
Are you up to something that maybe you want to
share with us? Please, I want to know about it.
You can use the hashtag ripple Effect and we will
see all of that, and then you can also tag
(36:05):
me at Jenakim Jones on Instagram and on TikTok and
maybe we can connect and talk about cool things that
we want to do together. I think that would be amazing,
So make sure you do that. Send us everything hashtag
ripple Effect. And of course we'll be back with a
new episode, and this next one, it's a Doozy. We
head out to some of the world disaster zones all
(36:26):
around the world and meet the tough and dedicated people
that volunteer to clean up prepare for the next one.
And also they do give out a lot of hugs.
They're tough guys and gals, but boy do they have
a soft spot and I love it, so don't forget
to join us.
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