The Story Of Eco-Soap and His Founder Samir Lakhani

Eco-Soap Bank was formed by Samir Lakhani, a University of Pittsburgh graduate. The project gathers leftover soap from hotels, diverts it from landfills, recycles it, and distributes it to those in need.
Samir was heavily involved in aquaculture and nutrition initiatives in northern Cambodian villages before creating Eco-Soap Bank in 2014. In Cambodia, Bangladesh, and Nepal, he has also invented solar lighting solutions. He has seen directly how supplying vital products like soap transforms the health and well-being of underprivileged people over his six years of nonprofit work in the areas of nutrition, water accessibility, and sanitation/hygiene.
After processing, his company, Eco-Soap Bank, gathers old soaps from hotels and redistributes them to those in need. Lakhani enlisted the help of a few experts to devise a method for melting down, sterilizing, and reprocessing old soap bars into new composite bars.
Since its founding in 2014, Samir Lakhani’s Eco-Soap Bank has worked to combat the spread of preventable diseases caused by a lack of access to soap and other hygiene services, as well as to reduce waste generated by the hotel industry. The social intervention also creates job opportunities for women in impoverished regions, providing them with a stable source of income. Over 1.3 million individuals have received hygiene education via Eco-Soap, and 147 women have gained employment.

For Eco-Soap Bank, Samir got a CNN Heroes Award in 2017 and a Unilever Young Entrepreneurs Award in 2018. He’s also given a TEDx Talk recently. He was also nominated to Forbes’ list of the top 30 social entrepreneurs under the age of 30.