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Hotels use a lot of hot water, and heating it releases a sizable amount of carbon dioxide. An innovative company called CleanO2 has now found a way of capturing these emissions and transforming them into sustainable soap and shampoo.
I don’t know about you, but I reckon a hotel offering of sustainable soap and shampoo is worth at least an extra star on Trip Advisor.
Both are currently being gifted as freebies in bathrooms throughout a Radisson hotel in the States. Within the maintenance area of the building, a device roughly the size of two refrigerators stores carbon dioxide emissions whenever guests take a shower.
As soon as the water tanks heat up – which releases a fair amount of CO2 – the state of the art CarbinX diverts the flow of emissions and partly converts them into a form of potassium carbonate. The resulting chemical, more commonly known as potash, is ideal for making all sorts of shower essentials.
That’s right, this is probably the only non-selfish scenario that can be used to justify taking a long shower. The website amusingly refers to the process as ‘sequestering suds.’
Every couple of weeks the material left behind is ‘harvested’ by technicians and sent off to commercial companies. Proprietors of the machine, CleanO2 then use the potash to form eco-friendly bars of soap and shampoo, selling tens of thousands of units a month.
If you wish to trade in your bog standard shower gel for some ‘Sustainable Spice,’ or perhaps a bar of ‘Enviro Mint’ you can do so here.
As carbon capture initiatives go, this is a real feat of engineering. Utilising the technology in the context of a single building is rare and impressive enough, but creating tangible goods from the emissions is an added bonus.
