Reminds me of when I came across an article about this charity last year: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cleantheworld.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cleantheworld.org&#x2F;</a><p>I&#x27;m sure they are good people with good intentions, but everything about it just annoyed me to no end. Aside from the unintentionally condescending aspect of literally giving the world&#x27;s poor our half used personal cleaning products, how could this possibly be efficient from either a monetary cost or energy use point of view? Instead of just buying a huge shipping container of new soap from a factory engineering by a huge soap company to be efficient as possible, they are spending thousands of man-hours collecting half used soap bars and re-manufacturing them in their own facility.<p>Then once they have the soap, there doesn&#x27;t even appear to be an on the ground logistical operation for distributing it to people efficiently. Instead volunteers go on trips where they apparently just show up and hand out soap to random villages and towns, resulting in tons of unfortunate website and fundraising photo ops of smiling white volunteers handing bars of soap to poor black and brown kids. Also, sometimes they wear super hero capes: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cleantheworld.org&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2014&#x2F;11&#x2F;medium-033_dsc_0092-jpg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cleantheworld.org&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2014&#x2F;11&#x2F;medium-...</a><p>So like the article said, this all seems simple, straightforward, and helpful on paper. But issues like clean water, sewage treatment, personal hygiene and public health are complex engineer and policy problems even in rich countries, and doubly so in ones with very limited resources. Just air dropping a bunch of recycled soap probably doesn&#x27;t achieve much beyond making you feel good.