Want to contribute to global health? Look no further than your local hotel – and their stash of used soap.
The Global Soap Project, founded in 2009 by Uganda native Derreck Kayongo, collects used hotel soap from hotels across the country, cleaning and reprocessing the bars before shipping them overseas to countries like Haiti, Kenya, Uganda and Swaziland.
Kayongo emigrated to the United States in the early 1990s and was shocked by the wastefulness of hotels who replaced rooms with new bars of soap each day.
“I tried to return the new soap to the concierge since I thought they were charging me for it,” Kayongo said. “When I was told it was just hotel policy to provide new soap every day, I couldn’t believe it.”Hundreds of millions of bars are discarded each year, Kayongo, a recipient of the CNN Heroes Award, told the news channel.
“The issue is not the availability of soap. The issue is cost,” Kayongo said. “Make $1 a day, and soap costs 25 cents. I’m not a good mathematician, but I’m telling you I’m not going to spend that 25 cents on a bar of soap. I’m going to buy sugar. I’m going to buy medicine. I’m going to do all the things I think are keeping me alive.”
Kayongo contacted his father, a former soap maker in Uganda, and began to devise a plan to send the soap back to countries in need.
So far, around 300 hotels participate in the program, which uses volunteers to collect the soap and ship to the Project’s main Atlanta warehouse. The bars are “reprocessed,” a procedure which includes sanitization, chilling, and re-cutting. The bars are then sent to a third party lab for approval before being sent overseas. The process is simple, but time-consuming, Kayongo, says, as bars of different brands cannot be mixed.
To date, the Global Soap Project has provided more than 100,000 bars of soap for communities in nine countries.
Thank you to CNN for the tip and for honoring such a worthy recipient with your award.
Does Cookie Monster have to buy two seats? Does Elmo travel carry-on only? You can ask them yourself this week as several Sesame Street characters appear at US airports this week to kick off summer travel with Delta Airlines.
Today, Elmo and Cookie Monster will be making gate announcements and welcoming travelers to Minneapolis-St Paul Airport, before meeting up with Grover at La Guardia on Tuesday. Elmo and Grover will wrap up the tour on Thursday at Atlanta‘s international airport.
Photo courtesy Flickr user Casey Fleser.
Want to travel more with Sesame Street? Check out Lonely Planet editor Robert Reid’s trip in the video below.
2010 was the Year of the Food Truck, with cities from Seattle and San Francisco to D.C. taking it to the streets, literally. While street food and taco trucks have long been a part of U.S. culture in places like New York, Los Angeles, and Oakland, health regulations have historically made it considerably more difficult in other parts of the country. Eatocracy reports that Atlanta–despite its tight mobile cooking laws–now has a “hybrid” approach that enables food trucks to exist, albeit in a different form. Could 2011 become the Year of the Mobile Farmers Market?
For the uninitiated, street food technically refers to food that is prepared (cooked, if applicable) and sold from a street cart, stall, or permanent stand. Food trucks are essentially mobile street food, and can change location from day-to-day, or remain parked in a stationary spot. These are not your “lunch” trucks of old, selling flabby sandwiches and processed, grab-and-go items. Today’s food truck offers food prepared from seasonal produce and other ingredients likely sourced from local family farms.
Until recently, state and county health departments largely prohibited street eats due to fears regarding potential foodborne illness. It’s harder to regulate things like sanitation and temperature control in a non-stationary kitchen, but far from impossible. Thanks to the open-mindedness of city officials across the country, enterprising chefs and other food industry professionals have been able to give mobile food operations a shot, the most successful of which have gone on to achieve national acclaim. Portland, Oregon, has been so supportive, there are now permanent designated locations for food cart clusters.
But even as we’re becoming more of a food truck nation, it’s still an uphill battle. Eatocracy states that Chicago is just one city making it next to impossible for actual cooking to be done on-site. Instead, food must be pre-packaged, which is a buzz-kill for many budding entrepreneurs. Atlanta requires convoluted logistical wrangling (trucks selling cooked-to-order food must change location every half-hour, nor operate at more than two locations a day) as a deterrent. One local farm’s solution: focus on the raw ingredient, not the end product.
Riverview Farms of Ranger, Georgia, has created a mobile farmers market that brings sustainably-grown produce to various locations in Atlanta. As creator Elmer Veith puts it, “We’re going to bring the farm field to the neighborhood, so you don’t have to come to us.”
Veith retrofitted a Mac Tools truck to create Riverview’s Farm Mobile. Customers enter the truck from the rear, and pay before exiting at the front. The sides are outfitted with shelves for produce, as well as the farm’s cornmeal and grits. There’s a freezer for Riverview’s grassfed beef and heritage Berkshire pork. Other offerings may include bread, pasture-raised chickens, free-range eggs, and cheese from other local food artisans and farms.
Customers get updates on Farm Mobile’s location and that day’s product via email, Facebook and Twitter. The social media aspect is a key part of the success of today’s food trucks. Yet Farm Mobile is subject to less regulations, because they’re not selling prepared food. They are, however, licensed by state authorities, and require permission from property owners to park on their land. If outfits like Farm Mobile (or Richmond, Virginia’s Farm Bus) catch on, can we expect to see more markets on wheels servicing urban areas? Greg Smith, President of the Atlanta Street Food Coalition, hopes so.
“Street food adds life and vibrancy to the city,” he says, predicting that in the future, “There will be multiple ‘food truck lots’ around the city and the trucks might move on a daily basis from lot to lot.” The Coalition, which seeks to help entrepreneurs break into the industry, is yet another sign that mobile eating is here to stay. TruxMap is an iPhone app that lets users hunt down their favorite food trucks, while dedicated sites such as Food Carts Portland are attracting legions of fans. The best way to show support, however, is to start eating on the street. Check out Eater.com, to see if there’s a food or farm truck (coming) near you.
Delta’s been Atlanta’s hometown airline for decades, and it looks like the bond between the two is getting a little stronger with the start of the 2011 Major League Baseball season. Delta Air Lines and the Atlanta Braves have announced a partnership that will lead to the opening of a new lot at Turner Field. Or, at least a re-branded portion of a lot. The current Green Park Lot — which is located directly across from the main entrance to Turner Field at the corner of Hank Aaron Drive and Ralph D. Abernathy Drive — will have 500 spots converted into dedicated spots for SkyMiles Medallion members. The upside here is the location; this is one of the closest places to park for the game, and should prove a perfect spot for tailgating activities. The downside is that you’ll still be required to pay the normal rate ($12 as of today) for parking.
In our opinion, Delta could’ve cut those who are Gold, Platinum or Diamond a break — possibly a free or discounted spot in return for their loyalty. As it stands, any Medallion member can show up and occupy the spot so long as they bring along their Medallion card, but there doesn’t look to be any price breaks in the cards. Still, it’s a nice (if minor) perk for being loyal to Delta, particularly for Atlanta-based Braves fans, and hopefully those with higher statuses will see a discount in their future. Hint, hint, Delta.
If you’re looking to take advantage, the SkyMiles Medallion Lot will available starting with the Braves scheduled exhibition games at Turner Field on March 29th and 30th. Their home opener against the Philadelphia Phillies is set for 7:35 p.m. ET, Friday, April 8, 2011.
In a Top 10 of phone calls you probably don’t want to receive from an airport official: “Your grandmother was found in baggage claim.”
Eighty-year-old Nefissa Yesuf’s Sunday Atlanta to Dulles flight didn’t go quite as planned. CNN reports that airline and airport staff failed to notice that a Delta employee had allegedly given her someone else’s boarding pass by mistake. Yesuf, who is from Ethiopia and doesn’t speak English, instead ending up landing in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Yusef’s granddaughter, Melika Adem, says she received a call from the airport telling her Yusef had been found in baggage claim, crying. According to Adem, Delta gave her grandmother someone else’s ticket, and an airline employee then wheeled her through security, where no one caught the snafu. Adem also states that the name on Yusef’s boarding pass wasn’t even “close” to her grandmother’s. Fortunately, the two women were reunited Sunday evening.
The incident is under investigation by both Delta and the TSA. TSA officers are required to match boarding passes with a passenger’s driver’s license, passport, or other photo identification. Says TSA representative Greg Soule,”Every day TSA screens nearly two million passengers and utilizes many layers of security to keep our nation’s transportation systems secure,” he said. “Every passenger passes through multiple layers of security to include thorough screening at the checkpoint.”