CleanConscience works alongside hotels and toiletry manufacturers to ensure that the maximum amount of partially used hotel soap and toiletries are recovered, re-purposed and redistributed for the benefit of those most in need of hygiene.
CleanConscience works alongside hotels and toiletry manufacturers to ensure that the maximum amount of partially used hotel soap and toiletries are recovered, re-purposed and redistributed for the benefit of those most in need of hygiene.
Becoming a CleanConscience programme partner is a very simple process and delivers on many levels. Not only does it have the potential to significantly reduce the amount of waste your business sends to landfill (and the associated costs) but it has proven to engage both staff and guests.
The benefits of the programme can be seen both in the environmental impact of your business and in your contribution to social and economic improvements locally and through our international partnerships.
Working with hotel housekeeping teams, we collect the partly used bars of soap and toiletries. These are then returned to our processing units and handled in one of several ways as demonstrated below:
Partly used bottles and tubes are kept separate in batches of the same brand and sorted into type – shampoo, body wash, conditioner and body lotion.
Manual decanting takes place by our SEND volunteers and a biocide, approved for cosmetic products, is added to the products themselves to make sure that the toiletries are safe for human use.
The products are then re-packaged in large volume containers, and made available for corporate charity donation as ReFresh™ toiletry products.
Businesses can choose to partner with CleanConsciencef
by sponsoring the donation of these bulk containers of re-purposed liquid toiletries to organisations in need of supplies, shelters and support facilities in the UK, as an example.
If your business would like to partner with CleanConscience please get in touch with the team by sending an email with “ReFresh Toiletry Products” in the heading.
These 1 and 3 litre containers are also offered in our pop-up shop, in exchange for a donation, to individuals and businesses keen to use recycled products or wishing to support the CleanConscience project – private individuals, offices, B&Bs, Guesthouses, Eco Hotels, Hair Salons, Gyms, for example.
Full or almost full bottles are sanitised by our regular volunteers, ready for placement into CareKit™ toiletry packs, as part of our community focussed activity sessions.
The CleanConscience CareKit™ activity is the perfect project for community-focussed team building exercises. It’s also a great class team, group or club activity that not only helps provide toiletries to those in dire need, but it also helps us raise much needed funds to build on the work we already do.
If your organisation, school, club or group would like to take part in a CareKit™ activity session then please get in touch with the team by sending an email with “CareKit Activity Session” in the heading.
Soap bars are sorted, cleaned, chipped and re-processed into soap powder and soap noodles, which are sent to the Kori Women’s Development Project in Sierra Leone, where micro-enterprises are set up to enable local women to support themselves and their families.
Prof Dame Julia Higgins says about recycling plastics: “… looking at the science of mixing plastic polymers together, it turns out they’re extremely reluctant to mix, and one of the consequences of that is if you try and mix them together, then you’d just get “crumbs”, it simply won’t hang together, it won’t mix…”
In other words, the different polymers all need to be kept separately, to make it possible to recycle them properly.
Gwen Powell, Founder of, and Project Director for CleanConscience, found that trying to engage with UK based plastics recyclers, you’d have to be able to offer a minimum of 14 tonnes of the same polymer at a time, and with many different types of polymer being used in plastic bottles, tubes, lids, and caps, that this is just not practical or financially sustainable.
Prof Higgins goes on to say: “My own view is that we should be burning the plastics, they are a source of energy, they came from oil, they should go back into the energy cycle, having borrowed them from the oil in the first place. To me, we shouldn’t be saying “we shouldn’t use plastics”, we should be saying “what is the end of their life”, we should be making it more useful as an energy source…”
It is a well known fact amongst manufacturers of hotel toiletries, that hotels wishing to recycle the plastics from the amenity-sized bottles and tubes are facing a huge challenge. Whilst the amenity bottles and tubes are marketed as being highly recyclable, and priced as such, it does not mean that the UK waste infrastructure is able to recycle the plastics.
We work with a number of partners within our Soap & Toiletry Recycling programme.
We offer a turnkey solution for hotels in Central London and we provide everything you need to incorporate this simple adjustment to your housekeeping team’s routines.
We charge a flat rate of £1.15 per room* per month and the programme includes:
If your property would like to take part in the soap and toiletry recycling programme then please get in touch with the team by sending an email with “Soap and Toiletry Recycling” in the heading.
* bathrooms in the case of suites
Volunteering at CleanConscience is appropriate for children as well as adults.
Volunteers must be at least 8 years old. Children ages 8 through 15 require supervision by a parent or guardian.
We can also accommodate a wide range of disabled people – physical disabilities, learning difficulties, autism, anxiety to name a few – please make enquiries to arrange an assessment visit, to see whether it is suitable for your requirements.
We can accommodate groups of up to 20 at any one time. CleanConscience is ready to host volunteers eager to make a difference!
If you, your organisation, school, club or group would like to volunteer with CleanConscience then please get in touch with the team by sending an email with “Volunteering” in the heading.
We realise how busy housekeeping teams are and have therefore aimed to make the recovery of soap and toiletries in house as easy as possible.
The housekeeping awareness posters video below can be downloaded to present on screen:
Read about how we’ve helped our clients make a difference. Click one of the case studies below to find out more:
You can read more about the charities we help below:
When ADA Cosmetics International acquired Pacific Direct, and two warehouses had to be merged into one, it was a good time to do a proper stock take and let go of any product not complying with the new branding; this resulted in 7 pallets of redundant stock that needed to be redistributed. On another occasion, just before the COVID lockdown in March 2020, 18 pallets of stock, close to their use by date, were donated for us to redistribute, rather than letting it run out of date.