When staying at hotels one of the first things I do is give the room a quick inspection, also checking out the variety of amenity products in the bathroom.

If we really like the soaps and shampoos, we take the extras but I can’t say that we do this frequently. I’ll try to describe my favorite hotel soap. (I wish I could remember which hotels gives it out and what brand it is…) The soap has little bumps all over one side so it’s something like a massaging bar and it smells good too. (If any of you know which soap I am referring to, please let us know.)

I came across an article on Yahoo News telling us how ” Your leftover hotel shampoo is saving thousands of lives“.

The article tells us about Shawn Seipler, a former sales executive that used to spend around 150 nights per year in hotels. Six years back he wondered what happened to leftover soap and shampoos at the hotels.

After leaving over many partially used shampoos and bars of soap, he asked the front desk at a hotel what they did with them. He then found out that they were just thrown out. (I would’ve expected that to be the answer…)

In the U.S, over one million bars of soap are thrown out each day and “there are 1.5 million childhood deaths each year due to diseases prevented by hand washing”, according to the World Health Organization.

In 2009 Seipler started Clean the World. The goal of the organization is to collect used soaps and shampoos from hotels, recycle and send them to children in need.

According to Yahoo, “The company has three large recycling centers where they process donated soap. In the centers, the soap goes through a disinfecting process and is melted and repackaged into new bars of soap“.

Talk about a brilliant idea!

Clean the World has already donated 25 million bars of soap to 99 countries thanks to partnerships with Hilton Worldwide, Starwood Hotels & Resorts, Marriott International, IHG, Best Western, Hyatt, Walt Disney World, Las Vegas Sands and Caesars Entertainment.

Seipler says that they’ve “diverted 7 million pounds of waste from North American and Asian landfills”.

This has got to be one of the more useful and more meaningful Earth friendly ideas that I’ve heard of in quite some time.

Find out more from Yahoo here.