Erin Zakis is the founder of Sundara, a company that recycles used bars of soap from hotels and redistributes them to people in India, Uganda, and Myanmar. This year she began expanding the company to Haiti and Jordan. It all began when she took a trip to Thailand and was shocked to find that teenagers had never seen soap before- they were so confused by this new thing they even tried to eat it! This was a huge wake-up call to Erin which inspired her a few years down the road to enter a LinkedIn for Good pitch competition where she ended up winning $10,000. With this money, she moved to India and immediately began making her vision a reality. Erin works with large hotel chains on a fee for service model. The hotels pay her company to pick up their trash with the soaps separated out, then it is taken to a recycling facility. Sundara hires widows, domestic violence victims, single mothers, and other women as community hygiene ambassadors to raise awareness in these countries where soap is an abstract concept. In this way, Erin Zakis has united her passion to help others with her entrepreneurial skills. Not only does she bring life-saving hygiene to over 100,000 people each month, but she empowers disadvantaged women by providing employment.
Wow! This is an incredible story! I would not immediately think of Thailand as being a place where teenagers would not know what soap is. I would guess that there are many partially used bars of soap left in hotel rooms, but I would have never thought of recycling them.
I recently stayed in a hotel with my family and as we were checking out we were discussing how great the waste is and how that could be overcome. I had no idea that action was already being take to eliminate waste but also to use that waste to benefit others. The phrase “One mans trash is another mans treasure” fits so well with this business model, because its taking something that we take for granted and using it to benefit others.