Unisoap is a Lyon-based non-profit organization, which was founded back in 2017 with one purpose: to recycle the used soap left over from hotels and giving it away to needing communities. This service can be life-saving for the millions of people that lack access to basic hygiene, according to Pauline Grumel, founder at Unisoap. Unfortunately, throwing used soap bars is a practice done by many hotels around the world, including in France, where according to Unisoap, 51 million bars of soap are being disposed of every year.

Unisoap tackles a big pollution issue with hotels

Before embarking on the journey of recycling soap, Pauline founded a communication and marketing company when she was 25 years-old, but the young entrepreneur felt she was missing something, which was proving a positive impact for the planet.

"In 2017, during a stay at a hotel in the south of France, I asked the hotel manager 'what do you do with the used soap?' and he told me that 'they all go into the trash'. So, I realized that if all hotels in France are doing this, it is a huge amount of waste, so after some research I found there was no recycling solution in France and that's why I decided to found Unisoap", Pauline told us.

Starting from there, Unisoap became the first French non-profit organization to collect and recycle used soap bars from hotels country-wide, with the company giving away the new soap bars for free for underprivileged communities that lack access to basic hygiene products. Thus, the company, Pauline explained, has a positive impact across three spheres: environmental, social and humanitarian.

The environmental aspect refers to obviously recycling the used bars of soap, which would otherwise be incinerated or buried underground, contributing to significant ecosystem damages. The humanitarian aspect is represented by giving away the soap for free to those who need it, but can't afford it. The social aspect is represented by the fact that Unisoap employs vulnerable people and people with disabilities in the company's factories to clean and recycle the collected soap bars.

So far, the company was able to distribute 70.000 soap bars to needing communities and recently, it started collecting other types of hygiene products, such as toothbrushes, shampoo and conditioner, also with the aim to recycle and remanufacture them. But this was not a smooth journey, per say. The founder of Unisoap told Green Start-Up that 2018 was the year when the first partnership was struck with hotels in France, but it took almost two additional years from that moment to manufacturing the first bar of soap.

That's because the engineer she collaborated with had to develop a machine and a recycling process from scratch for hygiene products, as well as testing multiple recycling processes to see which fits the purpose the best.

But the efforts paid-off, as at the beginning of 2021, Unisoap was able to deliver the first batch of recycled soap bars with the help of Restaurants of the Heart, another big French NGO. "It was a big challenge, because we were the first ones to recycle soaps in France, so we needed to face the European regulations, because at the end of the day, it is a new soap", Pauline explained.

How Unisoap developed a recycling process from scratch

These regulations are also part of the reason why it took the company so long to get the process right in the first place. To put it simply, hotels work with different soap brands, which in turn come with a different chemistry or composition, requiring a different recycling process and approach. Unisoap recycles soap bars from all over France, meaning that it works with various brands and the company recycles the soap in batches belonging to the same brand, adapting the process accordingly.

This was one of the bigger challenges faced in the beginning of the activity, but currently it's a fairly straight-forward process.

We will cover in detail how soap bars are being recycled in an upcoming "how it's recycled" article from our series, but to put it simply, the bars are first collected, obviously, then they are cleaned, grinded, melted and from that raw material, new hygiene products can be produced. In the beginning, the bars of soap were cleaned manually, but Unisoap now developed an automated process, using specialized machinery, which simplifies the whole procedure significantly.

Compared to other companies in the world that also recycle soap and solid cosmetics, the French organization has the advantage of stricter regulation, which means that the end product is certified and higher quality, free of harmful chemicals or other unwanted ingredients.

If you traveled in the past couple of years, you too have probably noticed a trend to remove the bars of soap from hotel bathrooms and instead replace them with liquid soap in dispensers. Despite this growing trend, Pauline told us that quite a large number of hotels in France at least still offer solid soap standard to guests and this might actually be beneficial for the environment.

Compared to liquid soap, which has to be transported in plastic bottles before being poured in dispensers, solid soap is usually wrapped in plastic or paper packaging, as a more sustainable alternative. This instantly makes solid soap the more planet-friendly product.

But that's not all. Liquid soap is almost 90% water, the founder told us and in order to transport the same volume of soap, 14 trucks of liquid soap are the equivalent of a single truck of solid soap, so even from a logistic stand-point it makes more sense to use solid soap bars.

So, solid soaps are better than liquid since they can be adapted to work with more sustainable packaging, they are easier to transport in large amounts as they are more efficient space-wise and they also contain better ingredients, generally speaking, because they use less harmful chemicals.

How Unisoap carries its mission forwards

Hotels in France that want to transition to a sustainable business model can start collaborating with Unisoap and give away used soap bars, as well as solid shampoo and conditioners to the company, which will take these hygiene products and recycle them. This way, these hotels can improve on their environmental performance and also help unprivileged communities have access to basic hygiene products.

Being a non-profit organization, all of the money that remains at the end of the year is being reinvested back into the company and because Unisoap doesn't sell the end products, it obtains its money from donations. Thus, the partner hotels are donating money every year to the organization, which in turn excludes them from certain taxes, and there are also other sources of income, such as private investors, foundations and regular people who want to support this project.

As far as the future plans are concerned, Pauline told us that the company looks at international expansion, as it now collaborates with hotels in France and Dubai, as well as expanding its product offering with more personal hygiene products, such as toothbrushes and other solid cosmetics, being recycled and distributed to vulnerable communities.