Placing Soap in the Hands of Those in Need
‘Hotel to Hands. From Around New Zealand to Around the World’

CHRISTCHURCH, New Zealand – For nearly thirty years, New Zealand owned and operated, Scenic Hotel Group has been committed to making a positive difference to communities and the environment. This commitment has now gone global, with the Group developing a relationship with the not-for-profit organisation, Soap Aid.

Soap Aid collects and reprocesses hotel waste soap redirecting it from Australian and New Zealand landfills to communities around the world without access to adequate sanitation. 1.4 million children under the age of five die each year due to preventable childhood infectious diseases including diarrhoea and pneumonia which handwashing with soap can significantly reduce. “Working with community impact partners we’ve sent more than 830,000 bars of recycled soap to targeted communities in Western Australia, Fiji, Cambodia, Somalia, Uganda, Zambia, Philippines, PNG, Vanuatu, India and Indonesia,” says CEO Mike Matulick.

While Scenic Hotel Group works on numerous environmental and community initiatives at a local level, Executive Chair, Lani Hagaman said: "the opportunity to make a difference on a global scale was something we could not pass up." With the opportunity for waste being so significant in the hospitality industry, something as simple as Soap Aid "seemed absolutely the right thing to get behind" says Mrs. Hagaman.

Soap Aid promotes a “hotels to hands” programme whereby unused, or partially used bars of soap are collected by the hotel, held until a pallet is filled and then, with the generosity of local and national transport and logistics partners is moved to the Soap Aid headquarters in Melbourne, Australia. The process of repurposing the soaps is undertaken by teams of volunteers and follows the following process chain from New Zealand hotel bathroom to the hands of those in need:

To see the work of Soap Aid volunteers and the recycling process in action, click here.

The most recent shipment made would have seen discarded guest soaps from Dunedin placed in the hands of children in Ghana.

Click here To see where Scenic Hotels throughout New Zealand are making an impact in global communities with Soap Aid.

Scenic Hotel Group encourages both its guests and colleagues within the industry to support the programme which Mrs. Hagaman describes as having both "the utmost transparency and simplicity in terms of taking soap quite literally from hotels and putting in the hands of communities where the simplest form of hygiene such as washing your hands can make a massive difference to the well-being and even survival or their community."

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