Why Erin Zaikis Is Recycling Soap For Rural Indians

India has had a long-standing struggle with the issue of sanitation. Nearly 600 million people in the country open-defecate due to no other alternative. The lack of clean water and adequate infrastructure has caused several villages to grapple with infections and diarrhoea-like diseases, while initiatives such as Modi’s Swachh Bharat have done little to bring any relief, even with gargantuan plans of constructing 12 crore toilets at a cost of Rs. 1.96 lakh crores, among other things.

While for most of us, washing our hands with soap is part of a daily routine, for many of our counterparts in rural areas, it is a luxury. According to a study by Unilever, currently 70 million Indians have never used soap. One child under the age of five dies every 30 seconds as a result of a preventable hygiene-related illness. Realising the need for immediate action, Erin Zaikis set her plan into motion. Over the past year, under the banner of her NGO the Sundara Foundation, she has been working towards bridging this gap in three countries—India, Myanmar and Uganda.

A few weeks ago, after much persistence, I finally got a chance to speak with Zaikis about her life and work. At the time, she was in her hometown of New York, so we set up a Skype session.
“Why recycle soap?” I asked immediately. It all began about three years ago, she recounts. She was working with EPCAT International, an organisation that worked towards eliminating trafficking of children and her work had taken her to the border of Thailand and Myanmar. Here, she met many children who were unfamiliar with soap and its uses so sh,e “brought them some soap from a neighbouring community and watched as they scratched the bar, smacked it on their head, one of them even tried to eat it.” The only thought that kept running through her mind was ‘how can they not know about something I have taken for granted every single day of my life?’ Seeing this problem that very few others seemed to be addressing, she came back to New York and started doing some research.

It was during this quest to understand the problem that she realised: while everyone was talking about the need for clean water, no one even took into consideration the fact that many out there didn’t have access to soap, or even hygiene education for that matter. Seeing the gap in the equation, she realised she had to do something herself. Eventually, she started a soap company that donated their produce to hygiene programs around the world. After a few months, she realised that she could be running a hygiene program herself, and so she switched to full-blown, non-profit company that recycles soap.

“It is the simplicity of the concept that I am drawn to. I always wanted to spend my life working towards a cause,” she admits. “When I was working with EPCAT, I was constantly second-guessing myself. It was a complex problem and when I would try to talk to the parents, they would ask me what I knew about poverty and the answer was: ‘nothing’. Coming from a privileged background, I felt like it wasn’t my place to tell them what to do. But now, doing what I do, I feel like I am making a difference. I think it is a question of dignity, because everyone has the right to be clean, and by extension, healthy. At a time when we are so far advanced in various fields, there shouldn’t be people who lack the basics. And it feels great knowing that I am doing my best to change this,” she shares.

The ups and downs of soap recycling
Of course, the shift wasn’t easy. Learning the process of recycling soap took a lot of time and effort. It was something of a trial-and-error process, which began in her kitchen. Later, she realised that in India, the ingredients used in the manufacturing of soap were different. Adding to this, the fact that their workshop is located in a slum that faces a lot of power shortages. Work that involved a regular flow of electricity wasn’t feasible, and ultimately they settled on a simple chemical sanitisation process. “We recycle soap not because there is a lack of soap but there is a lot of waste that is not being connected to the needy. The hospitality industry in the US alone, throws away a billion bars of soap every year. India’s landfills are already overflowing and by taking out the heavy soap waste, we are making a difference to the environment as well. So, it is more than just hygiene,” she clarifies.

How do they source the waste material to be begin with? At present, they have tie-ups with 17 hotels in Mumbai of different stature—from Hilton and Taj to smaller boutique hotels such as Abode and Meluha The Fern—and are trying to rope more brands to join their cause. “The concept was new, which made it very hard for most of these hotels to agree to be a part of our cause. They didn’t really trust me. But, once we took them to the workshop and showed them what we do, and to the villages where we distribute the soap, we managed to get through them.”

However, it was much easier to reach out to the villagers. They have several partners who are involved in the on-ground work, such as REAP and the Gabriel Project Mumbai who helped them out on this front. “These organisations already take classes in the rural areas. They focus on improving education and also take classes on nutrition and oral hygiene. We simply added our program on hygiene and sanitation into their curriculum. Working with an existing program, rather than having to create one of our own from scratch, made things much easier for us,” she confides.

Seeing how their work was benefitting many, Zaikis decided to take her work forward to Myanmar and Uganda. “How different was the experience?” I ask. “In Myanmar, people are very focused on charity and so I didn’t face the scepticism that I did in India. Almost everyone that we talked to here was excited to be a part of our work. Of course, I understand why it was hard in India. Here, there are millions non-profits and not all of them are honest. But the good thing is, it means that you have to prove yourself and show that you are doing good work, which really pushes you. Uganda is very similar, which might be because most hotels here are run by Indians,” she laughs.

However, she believes that working in India was a truly powerful experience. “It is hard, but it has changed my life in so many ways. I have realised that the real purpose in life is to use your privilege to make someone else’s life a little better. As difficult as it has been, it has been enriching and gratifying.”

What makes the Sundara Foundation efficient as a social program? As Dr. R.A. Mashelkar, the Chairman of the Technology Expert Committee of Prime Minister’s Swachh Bharat Mission suggests, the success of an initiative is measured in terms of its ‘scalability, sustainability, acceptability and rapid deploy-ability’. Zaikis made sure that the Sundara Foundation conforms to all these parameters. Apart from making a significant difference to the environment and the problem of rural sanitation, she decided to take on the issue of women empowerment, albeit on a small scale. Their workshops hire women from underprivileged backgrounds and give them an opportunity to work and have a dignified life. “It is not just about being able to work. They get paid, which helps them with their family and when others see that she is pulling her weight, they automatically start to respect her. I think, that is very important,” she says.

A few weeks after my conversation with Zaikis, our in-house photographer Karan Khosla and I made a trip to their workshop in Kalwa. Here, we had the opportunity to meet the three women responsible for the Mumbai project and observe their work. Introduced to this world by Erin Zaikis during one of their Mahila Bachat Ghat meetings, they have been a part of this program for a year now.

The Mumbai project’s team

After an hour long journey, we were picked up from Kalwa station by two of the employees at the workshop—Madhuri Pawar and Sushma Mamuni—who led us to a 1bk overlooking a sewage, aka, the workshop. While both of us had pictured an industrial equipment-heavy space, we were surprised to see a simple room, complete with a table that was lined with samples, a few chairs and three manual compressors.

38-year-old Madhuri Pawar lives with her mother in Kalwa. As the sole breadwinner of the house, she feels happy to be able to be a part of something that helps her. “We all live nearby, so we don’t have to spend anything on travelling. Whatever we make goes into running our homes. This job allows me make a difference to the lives of several children.”

30-year-old Sushma Mamuni is a mother of two. “My husband is very happy. He works too, but whatever I make helps my family. Knowing that I am making a difference to those little children makes me happy as well.”

40-year-old Kanchan Kashyap shares the same sentiment. “I get money for the work I do and I get to help many children. It makes me feel good.”

It took them a while to warm up to us. Karan, our photographer, and I tried to make them feel as comfortable as we could. Eventually, the trio shyly took us through the process step-by-step.
It is fairly simple—they scrape the soap that they receive from the hotels using a grater. They need 500 grams of shavings to be able to get to the next step.

The shavings is mixed with water, to form a lumpy mixture, which is then placed on a mould that is lined with paper.

The shavings are then pressed using a manual compressor to form a block of soap, which is then dried and cut into cubes before being packaged and sent out. The equipment had been donated to them by Diversey, which is a leading provider of commercial cleaning, sanitation and hygiene solutions.

While it takes only about seven minutes for the entire recycling process, it takes them about three days to complete the soap-making, which leaves them with at least 40 bars of soap.

Every day they put in six hours, and at the end of a month, they would have produced a minimum of 3,000 bars of soap—all of which is sent out to Shilonda, located on the Gujarat-Maharashtra border, Kalwa and Palghat. They hope to be able to expand their program to the rest of the country, eventually. However, at present, they are focussing their energies towards expanding it within Maharashtra.

As Erin Zaikis concludes, “They are the true heroes. All I do is organise, but they are the ones who do all the work. They even distribute soaps within their area, which is Kalwa. We have trained other women and teachers to educate and distribute within the villages that we work in. So they are the ones who make this project successful.”

All images by Karan Khosla