RENU HYGIENICS
DAILY SOAP OPERATION Recycled bars get more than one life to live By Jim Timlick
A Brandon-based start-up wants to help Manitobans clean up — literally. ReNu Hygienics is the brainchild of CEO Parker Easter. The company’s primary mission is to recycle used bars of hotel soap to create new, high-end soaps.
E aster first came up with the idea for the sustainable soap-and- wellness company three years ago during a trip to Toronto. He was on his way to a meeting of Enactus Canada — a collective of student entrepreneurs who identify issues in their communities and seek out solutions — when the bottle of shampoo in his carry-on was seized by Canadian Air Transport Security Authority officers at the airport. The incident was still fresh in his mind when he checked in at his Toronto hotel, and it got him thinking about the soap and other toiletries that were being discarded on a daily basis. “In that moment it really irked me,” he recalls. “I thought how wasteful is this. I suddenly realized there must be a huge problem here and there might be a big opportunity.” It turns out he was right. Easter discovered that an estimated 180 million bars of hotel soap end up in Canadian landfills in a typical year. He also learned that some 700,000 Canadians rely on donated soap in any given year because they can’t afford to purchase their own. Two problems inspired one solution — ReNu Hygienics. “I really wanted to get in-between those
two problems and try to pair them together to strike them out,” he says. Environmental sustainability and philan- thropy go hand-in-hand. For every bar of Environmental sustainability and philanthropy go hand- in-hand. For every bar of soap it sells, the company donates another bar to families and organizations. soap it sells, the company donates another bar to families and organizations. “The buy one, give one model makes the most sense in a sustainable and financially stable way, where it allows us to grow and empower people at the same time,” Easter explains. He conceptualized the idea for his company in the fall of 2018. He then spent the next two years working out the details
and chasing down potential investors. In May 2020 he teamed up with fellow Brandon University student Silas Lee to commercialize the concept. With help from a team of scientists, ReNu created a process to upcycle partially used bars of soap into completely new products. The first step removes a thin outer layer from the soap so that only the untouched portion of the bar remains. That remaining material is then crushed, disinfected and melted down. Ingredients such as Manitoba- harvested honey (which helps soften skin) or activated coal (which helps draw out toxins and impurities) are added before the melted soap is poured into 3-D print molds and allowed to cure for a few weeks before it’s made available for sale. ReNu got off to a rousing start after its official launch last summer. Between June and December, the company sold just over 1,300 bars of soap through its website and at four retail locations. It hit a bit of a speedbump after selling out of product at the end of 2020. Since few guests were staying at hotels during the pandemic, the supply of raw material slowed to a trickle. That supply has begun flowing again and ReNu expected to have all of its products available again by May.
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SPRING 2021
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