A little over 10 years ago, while teaching English in northern Cambodia, Samir Lakhani had a soap epiphany. “I saw a village mom bathing her newborn kiddo, but unfortunately, she was scrubbing him with laundry powder, which can be quite harmful to the skin.” It was all the mother had to use.  According to UNICEF, 2.3 billion people around the world do not have handwashing facilities with running water and soap available at home. This has consequences. It’s estimated that the simple act of using soap to wash hands, for example, can prevent up to one million deaths and can reduce the risk of respiratory illnesses by up to 21 percent in both children and adults. What Lakhani witnessed in Cambodia changed his life. “Ever since I have wanted to work in soap and to connect people with proper soap,” he says. He came up with a smart but simple idea: rescue used soap from hotel trash bins and deliver it to communities where it could save lives. Students practice washing their hands after their hygiene lesson at Lvea Primary School in Cambodia. Credit: Sharon Radisch / Eco-Soap Bank Hotels have stringent hygiene protocols that require toiletries, regardless of whether they’ve been opened or used, to be thrown out at the end of a guest’s stay. It’s estimated that globally, five million hotel soap bars are tossed every day. Ending up in the landfill, they join a melee of other products emitting harmful greenhouse gases, such as methane, into the atmosphere. Many of the oils used in the manufacture of soap are biodegradable, but when added to a compacted pile of trash and deprived of air, they do not decay quickly. Some soaps also contain dyes or phosphates that are not naturally decomposable. In 2014, Lakhani founded Eco-Soap Bank, which has since diverted over 14 million pounds of soap from landfills around the world. In its early years, Eco-Soap built a global network of more than 1,000 hotels to intercept this waste. Then came the pandemic, and many of those hotels shut down as people stopped traveling. “We needed to find another source of soap to recycle, and we began to reach out to soap factories,” Lakhani says. “We uncovered a dirty truth.” Annually, about a quarter-billion bars of soap go directly into landfills because of small manufacturing or aesthetic defects that make them unsellable.  Weighed down by negative news? Our smart, bright, weekly newsletter is the uplift you’ve been looking for. [contact-form-7] Rescuing and recycling the entirety of this soap factory waste stream could prevent the emission of approximately 44 million tons of CO2e and save over 29 million gallons of water per year, according to research conducted by Eco-Soap Bank.   Eco-Soap is not alone in its mission to rescue soap and get to those who need it the most. In Australia, the nonprofit organization Soap Aid collects, sorts, cleans and reprocesses soap from accommodations across Australia and New Zealand into fresh, hygienic soap bars. These soap bars are then redistributed to communities in need throughout the southern continent and the world. Since its inception in 2011, the organization has kept over 380 metric tons of soap out of landfills. A worker sorts soap for Soap Aid. Courtesy of Soap Aid When discarded soap arrives at the organization’s recycling facility in Melbourne, it’s sorted, any packaging is removed, and it’s fed into a hopper that sends it through recycling machines that grind it into small noodle shapes. “These noodles are heated, blended and reformed into new bars,” explains Laura O’Leary, partnership engagement office. In Canada, Soap for Hope, based in Victoria, British Columbia, also upcycles soap but uses less rigorous methods. “Bacteria doesn’t grow on soap,” notes the organization’s founder, C. Anne McIntyre. The soap bars received by Soap for Hope are hand-scraped by the organization’s battalion of volunteers, who also sort and repurpose other materials like old hotel linens and amalgamate new bottles of shampoos and conditioners from half-used ones rescued from hotels throughout British Columbia and Alberta. As with Lakhani, it all started when McIntyre had her soap epiphany in 2015. “I used to do international aid and we were sending soap overseas with disaster kits, and [it] just seemed very obvious that people needed that,” she says. However, the liquid amenities such a shampoo sometimes received with the donations of soap could not be sent overseas. McIntrye took it upon herself to take those products to shelters in Victoria. “They were ecstatic to receive it,” she recalls. This joy at receiving a simple bottle of shampoo made her realize that her own community also lacked access to hygiene products. She decided to do something about it. Flash-forward to 2025, and McIntyre has built partnerships with regional hotel chains such as the Fairmont and Marriott, and the nonprofit provides hygiene products to over 500 community service organizations in British Columbia and Alberta. In 2024, Soap for Hope worked with hotels to divert nearly 6,500 pounds of waste from landfills. Courtesy of Soap for Hope Canada In 2024, the British Columbia-based hotel brands Hotel Zed and Accent Inns worked with Soap for Hope to divert nearly 6,500 pounds of waste from landfills, according to Peter Dohan, manager of operations at Hotel Zed and Accent Inns.  In Vancouver, Mom2Mom, a nonprofit service organization supporting low-income families, receives donations of toiletries from Soap for Hope. According to Caitlen Creaney, food program and participant engagement coordinator, mothers will forgo things such as scented body wash or skin care for themselves to stretch the budget and make sure their children have what they need. This, though, can have dire consequences. In January 2025, Soap for Hope sponsored Canada’s first Hygiene Poverty Survey. Polling their database of service organizations in British Columbia and Alberta, almost 98 percent of respondents reported that their clients experienced negative mental health outcomes, including stress, anxiety and depression, due to hygiene inequity. In addition to basic hygiene products like soap, Soap for Hope also offers body washes and skin care products. Many are collected from hotels, and others from community drives in which bins are set up in local malls and the general public is invited to drop off donations of unused or half-used hygiene products. According to McIntyre, receiving body wash, moisturizer or even shaving lotion goes a long way in helping to restore an individual’s sense of dignity, health and self-confidence.  At Soap for Hope, the motto “nothing goes to waste” extends beyond soap to include the plastic containers that once housed body wash, shampoo or conditioner. Containers that can’t be repurposed by Soap for Hope are sent to a recycling depot, which grinds the plastic down into filaments that can be embedded into cement to make it more durable. Wait, you're not a member yet? Join the Reasons to be Cheerful community by supporting our nonprofit publication and giving what you can. Join Cancel anytime Creating hygiene equity in sustainable ways, though, is a challenge. “When Soap Aid was founded in 2011, the concept of the circular economy was still emerging,” says O’Leary. There was, as she points out, little awareness about hygiene waste or the environmental cost of discarded hotel soap. It’s only in recent years that the conversation around sustainability and corporate social responsibility has emerged. In the beginning, according to O’Leary and Carol Bellew, Soap Aid’s general operations manager, just setting up a recycling plant was a significant achievement. Most commercial soap machinery is designed to work with uniform, factory-grade inputs. Recycling bars that vary in size, brand, texture and condition requires fine-tuning. The machinery was sourced from multiple manufacturers and had to be tested multiple times to make sure it could do the job. McIntyre also admits that fundraising to keep Soap for Hope solvent is difficult, especially during economic downturns when, traditionally, donations go down but needs go up. But perhaps her biggest challenge has been proving to the skeptics that she could bridge the gap between sustainability and hygiene inequality. “I can’t tell you how many people told me I was so crazy when we started,” she says. “But it just made such perfect sense to me. Everyone needs soap.” The post What Happens to Leftover Hotel Soap? appeared first on Reasons to be Cheerful.

Ordinarily, battles and wars are won by long-term preparation, military concepts, methods and the weapons available to both sides. While the outcome of battles could be predictable due to the level of preparation of one party compared to the other, for instance, a country with a thousand military aircraft is expected to triumph easily if […] The post 10 Times Trickery Won Battles appeared first on Listverse.

Artist’s illustration of GJ 12 b and its host star. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Hurt)What can Earth-sized exoplanets teach scientists about the formation and evolution of exoplanets throughout the cosmos? This is what a recently submitted study hopes to address as an international team of researchers announced the discovery of an Earth-sized exoplanet that exhibits temperatures and a density comparable to Earth. This study has the potential to help scientists better understand the formation and evolution of Earth-sized exoplanets and what this could mean for finding life beyond Earth, universetoday.com reports. For the study, the researchers used the University of Chicago’s MAROON-X instrument to analyze the recently discovered GJ 12 b (aka Gliese 12 b), which is located approximately 40 light-years from Earth and orbiting an inactive M dwarf star, meaning its solar activity is reduced compared to other stars. GJ 12 b was discovered by NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) in 2024 and measured its temperature and radius at approximately 300 K (26.85 Celsius/80.33 Fahrenheit) and 0.96 Earths, respectively. Now, researchers used MAROON-X to measure GJ 12 b’s mass and eccentricity at approximately 0.71 Earths and 0.16, respectively. For context, Earth’s eccentricity is 0.0167, with eccentricity being measured from 0 to 1 as a perfect circle and completely elongated, respectively. Knowing GJ 12 b’s mass enabled the researchers to estimate its density at approximately equal to or slightly less than Earth. The researchers note that NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) could be used to conduct more in-depth observations of GJ 12 b, specifically its atmosphere. “GJ12b appears to possess an Earth-like or sub-Earth density,” the study notes. “A low density could be explained if the planet has a volatile component (such as water mixed within the mantle), an atmosphere, a low iron mass fraction, or some combination of these factors. Its low mass (and thus low surface gravity) may result in it having a diffuse atmosphere that would be highly amenable to JWST observations, but it is also possible that the planet has too low a mass to retain an atmosphere long-term unless it is replenished regularly by tidally-induced volcanism.” The researchers compared the planetary and system characteristics of GJ 12 b and its M dwarf to the TRAPPIST-1 system, the latter of which contains seven Earth-sized exoplanets orbiting an M dwarf star. While GJ 12 b is the only confirmed exoplanet in its system, it orbits within the interior edge of its star’s habitable zone, whereas three of the seven Earth-sized exoplanets within the TRAPPIST-1 system orbits within its star’s habitable zone. The reason for the comparison to the TRAPPIST-1 system is the researchers hypothesize that studying GJ 12 b could prove promising due to its inactivity, whereas the TRAPPIST-1 star’s activity makes studying the atmospheres of its exoplanets difficult. As noted, this study was conducted with the University of Chicago’s MAROON-X instrument, which is designed to study Earth-sized exoplanets orbiting within the habitable zones of M dwarf stars and is installed on the International Gemini Observatory. MAROON-X uses the radial velocity method, which measures wobbles that occur between the exoplanet and its star, with the latter frequently being used to estimate planetary characteristics like mass and radius and orbital characteristics. Most recently, MAROON-X was used to discover four mini-Earths orbiting Barnard’s Star, which is located approximately 6 light-years from Earth. As the number of confirmed exoplanets approaches 6,000, Earth-sized exoplanets like GJ 12 b is helping astronomers better understand the formation and evolution of exoplanets orbiting M dwarf stars, the latter of which are smaller than our Sun. What new discoveries about GJ 12 b and other earth-sized exoplanets will researchers make in the coming years and decades? Only time will tell, and this is why we science! The post New Earth-Sized Exoplanet Hints at the Possibility of Life Beyond Our Home appeared first on Anomalien.com.

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