CleanConscience Information

Since 2015, CleanConscience (CleanC) has developed and run a successful CIO, starting out with providing a partly used soap and toiletry recycling service to the hotel industry, offering supported volunteering opportunities to local people at our toiletry processing centre near Maidenhead, and distributing the recovered soap and toiletries to those in need in the UK and beyond. We have diverted 156 tonnes of soap and toiletries from landfill, and supported over 2,700 volunteers, with a focus on local people with additional needs. We have distributed recovered soap and toiletries via over 93 community organisations and charities in the UK, including women’s refuges, food banks and refugee support projects, seven orphanages and foster homes in Lithuania, and three charities in Sierra Leone. Demand for our services collapsed during COVID, when empty hotels had no soap and toiletries to recycle. The hotel industry has begun to provide toiletries to guests via pump and wall dispensers, rather than using small individual soaps and bottles of toiletries. We welcome this environmentally responsible change, and associated reduction in product and packaging waste. We had foreseen this shift in the sector and have been exploring options for pivoting our work, and since 2018 we have been extending our relationships in the hospitality sector by providing hotel redistribution and clearance services – removing redundant furniture, fittings and electronics from hotels, undergoing upgrades and refits, providing supported volunteering opportunities to local people who assist in refurbishing or up-cycling the recovered items, then distributing these to charities in the UK and abroad. Our hotel redistribution and clearance work has diverted over 1,675 tonnes of assets that still had a resource value, from going to landfill or being incinerated. We estimate that our recovered toiletries, and assets from hotel clearances, have reached over 250,000 people in need in the UK and beyond.