A clean future: Bangor man reprocesses hotel soap for the needy - La Crosse Tribune

In many countries, soap is a luxury, but here in the states, tons of complementary soap, shampoo, conditioner and lotion go to waste every year.

For world-weary traveler and local businessman Dennis Wood, this waste was an opportunity waiting to be exploited.

Partnering with his local Kiwanis club, the 80-something-year-old began collecting unused soap, shampoo and lotion from local hotels and reprocessing it into full size bars.

Once reprocessed, these bars are shipped all over the world—places like Sierra Leon in Africa, all the way to orphanages in Peru and Columbia.

“A significant amount goes to an orphanage in Bogota, Columbia,” Wood said. “A lot has gone to Africa, Haiti, Sierra Leon.”

He said some bars go to third-world countries, while others end up in the hands of La Crosse men and women through programs like Wafer.

“I know how important it is for people, and how happy they are to get it,” Wood said.

Wood, now an affluent business man, is no stranger to poverty. In fact, he was born into poverty. He said he grew up in his grandparents’ garage, in Pine City just east of Minneapolis and St. Paul, during the height of the Great Depression.

After putting himself through college, where he studied forestry, he traveled, working from the wild west to the cold Alaskan tundra.

He later went to work for the Webster Lumber Company and eventually moved to Bangor to help start a new facility there. During his years living in Bangor, he bought up nearly 700 acres of land where he raised beef cattle.

“I’ve been in the cattle business for 50 years,” Wood said. “Buying this Coulee was one of the best moves I’ve made.”

Wood retired from the Webster Lumber Company in the mid 90s after 30-some years of service, and began dedicating his time to the cattle business and working the land.

About nine years ago, while Wood and his wife were browsing the web, they discovered a small soap reprocessing kit. He said for $80, it came with a knife and a few instructions for turning unwanted and unused hotel bath soap in to large, long-lasting bars.

Wood, a 53-year member of Kiwanis, approached the club with a plan to reprocess soap sourced from local hotels on a larger scale.

Nearly a decade and more than 140,000 bars of soap later, Wood is still hard at work making sure people who can’t afford this simple luxury can have it. He said a lot of very deadly diseases can be avoided with proper hygiene and a little soap.

The process starts when Wood arrives home from picking up bags of unused soap for the 10 hotels spread out between La Crosse and Sparta.

He said the first step is to separate the tiny bars of soap from bottles of shampoo, conditioner and lotion. Repackaging the shampoo is the easiest part, he said. The small bottles are drained into larger containers, given a label and boxed up for distribution.

Reprocessing the soap takes a little more work. Wood starts by separating the bars of soap. Yellow bars are processed separately from the white to prevent a marbled appearance later on.

Once separated, the bars are put through a meat grinder to reduce the soap to fine chips. These are combined with a few cups of water and melted in a boiling hot slow-cooker over several hours.

The melted soap is then poured into molds and allowed to cool and dry for at least 24 hours before being cut into thick bars.

The final step before boxing up the soap is to dry them.

Wood said this process takes as long as two weeks, during which the soap shrinks and looses a considerable amount of weight. This makes the soap easier to ship in large quantities.

The process consumes Wood’s time. He said on average, he spends 20-plus hours a week reprocessing soap. Over the two-week-long processing time, Wood makes as many as 1,000 bars of soap.

“It gets boring sometimes,” he said. “I have no problem getting rid of it.”

Now 85, Wood said he hopes to spread the practice to other Kiwanis clubs throughout the country.

“I’d like to expand it,” he said. “I’ve not been able to get that to spread.”

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