00:00 It's a bit of a grind, but this mush is making a difference.
00:06 It really is changing their lives.
00:08 About a third of the world's population don't have access to suitable sanitation.
00:12 Globally, every day millions of bars of barely used soap from hotels gets binned.
00:17 For Mike Matulak, who's been in the hotel supplier business for 20 years, it's a stain.
00:22 So a decade ago, he founded SoapAid.
00:24 I really felt compelled that I was part of the problem.
00:27 The charity takes hard bars from hotels that normally go to landfill.
00:32 It's manually, visually inspected, with the reusable soaps checked with a metal detector
00:37 and the outer layer removed by a hand scraper.
00:41 Then, it's further treated, strained and remoulded and packaged by machinery and workers from
00:48 the bridge, which helps adults with special needs find long-term employment.
00:52 The whole process itself is fairly quick.
00:54 It only takes about half an hour.
00:57 It's also cheaper than making a virgin bar.
00:59 It's about a tenth of the cost.
01:01 That means less fuel, carbon dioxide and stops about 10 tonnes of soap a year going to landfill.
01:08 The big reason Sustainability Victoria has just awarded SoapAid $250,000 to expand its
01:15 operations.
01:17 Operations that started small, but in a decade now has 250 participating hotels in Australia
01:22 and New Zealand.
01:24 And so far, 2.9 million bars of soap have been remade from scraps and distributed to
01:30 communities in need, including communities in remote and regional Australia.
01:34 Preventing children from getting sick more often.
01:36 They're able to go to school more often.
01:40 So their literacy improves, their life outcomes improve.
01:44 Communities are able to draw themselves out of poverty just purely because of the access
01:47 to something so critical to their hygiene.
01:49 [BLANK_AUDIO]
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