Businessman Prepares to Clean Up by Turning Hotel Soap to Detergent

By Norman Gidney, Times Colonist staff

Those little bars of soap that guests leave behind in Victoria hotel bathrooms are finding a new use as laundry detergent, in a recycling project touted as being unique in Canada.

Entrepreneur Roger Sevigny estimated that hotels in the Victoria area use 70,000 kilograms of soap bars a year and most are thrown in the trash after just a shower or two.

Hotels have several other recycling programs to cut down garbage and water waste - there's even an international Green Hotels Association - and have been receptive to Sevigny's idea. He has soap coming from 5,000 rooms at 65 Victoria-area motels, hotels and bed-and-breakfasts.

"We are interested in being environmentally friendly. We are doing what we can," said Debra Koski, assistant controller at the Ocean Pointe Resort hotel on the waterfront.

"They approached us. I thought it was a wonderful idea."

The arithmetic is compelling. With 250 rooms, there are 91,250 guest-nights available at the OPR in a year. With 69 per cent average annual occupancy and a couple of 50-gram bars used in each room every day, she calculated that the hotel generates 3,140 kilograms of used soap bars.

Recycling isn't complicated. Housekeeping staff gather soaps from the rooms and drop them in a big plastic tote box on each floor. When the boxes are full, they phone and Sevigny has the boxes picked up.

The hotel has five rooms with liquid soap dispensers, which the OPR calls its "green rooms," but most hotel guests aren't keen on the idea.

"They don't feel as special if they're getting the same soap everyone else used," said Koski.

At the 45-4oom James Bay Inn, exective housekeeper Donna Reiter is a fan of soap recycling.

"I think it's an excellent idea. When he mentioned it to me, I went for it right away."

Consulting chemist Colin Taylor of Surrey has spent 22 years working for such companies as Lever Bros. and Cheesbrough Ponds. He developed and tested the formula for Sevigny's Buffalo Soap, and said the recycling project is unprecedented.

Sevigny has spent $30,000 to date on his business, H.I. (for Hospitality Industry) Landfill Diversion Inc., buying a grinder and 165 plastic boxes, renting a small warehouse in James Bay and on a first run of 2,000 bags prepared at VIP, a Vancouver-area soap maker. VIP mixes the ground bar soap 50-50 with other additives. Sevigny boasts that there are no nitrates, phosphates or bleach.

Local artist Jimmie Wright - an acquaintance of Sevigny who donated money to help save the Victoria school strings music program - has let one of his buffalo paintings be used on the label. He also will give away 100 bags of the first shipment of soap at his downtown art gallery.

The new product has been an easy sell. Sevigny just got it into several local markets and drugstores and big independent chain Thrifty Foods will carry Buffalo Soap in all 17 supermarkets by the end of this week.

"I made six sales calls and made six sales," said Sevigny. "We haven't had a 'no' yet from anybody."

The two-kilogram bags of laundry soap retail for $5 to $6, less than the major brands but not the cheapest product.

If people buy it for washing their shorts and sheets at home, Sevigny will expand. His son-in-law is ready to make the rounds of Whistler and Vancouver hotels and a Calgary contact will do the same in the Alberta city. Signing up 20,000 hotel rooms in Vancouver-Whistler would generate more than 200,000 kilograms of bar soap annually.

Sevigny isn't going to stop with little bars of soap. His next idea is recycling leftover hotel shampoo and conditioner in the little plastic bottles, maybe reformulated for a car wash product.

Source: Victoria Times Colonist (Wednesday June 13, 2001) A1.

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