Kennesaw, December 23, 2013 ─ Many VJI staff are active in their communities and participate in many volunteer programs every year. To make this year’s holiday season special, VJI organized a half-day trip to help the Global Soap Project.
“Global Soap Project is a nonprofit that collects discarded soap bars from hotels, purifies and reprocesses them into new bars, and then sends them around the world to other nonprofits that distribute them,” says Courtney O’Connor who organized the trip. “The nonprofit was established in 2009 to collect bars from more than 2.5 million that are thrown away each day, and turn them into a product that can be used to wash hands and reduce the risk of life-threatening diarrhea and other diseases by up to 50%.”
On December 20, six VJI staff arrived in the morning at the processing facility in a light warehouse and industrial park near Norcross, Georgia. A staff worker at Global Soap explained the program and took the group for a tour of the facility, which included a receiving and sorting area, an inspection and cleaning area, and a processing area with machines that grind the soap and then screen and extrude it before it is cut into bars and placed into boxes for shipment. “The process is similar to other processing plants that we have toured,” says Senior Tax Consultant Chris Wiggins, “although on a much smaller scale.”
Following a brief training session, VJI staffers then rolled up their sleeves and got down to their job of inspecting and cleaning pre-sorted recovered soap bars. After a few hours of getting the soap bars prepped for the next processing stage, the crew had finished hand-processing about 500 pounds of soap. “We were very happy to help recycle something that’s usually thrown into landfills for reuse as a life-saving tool throughout the world,” says VJI CEO Valerie Jordan. “We consider it a privilege to be able to give up our time and energy to help others in our community and, in this case, around the world. We look forward to assisting other organizations in the coming years.”
