A decade after Pitt gave him room to chase an idea, Samir Lakhani (A&S ’15) is making an impact and helping the next generation do the same
When Samir Lakhani (A&S ’15) noticed a mother scrubbing her baby with harsh laundry powder during a study abroad trip to Cambodia a decade ago, he suddenly lost interest in the trip’s original purpose. He quickly researched the global hygiene problem and became obsessed with it.
His advisors didn’t try to rein him in. They gave him space to explore the problem and the solution he had begun to formulate – recycling unused soap scraps via a network of primarily women-operated production facilities in developing nations and then distributing the repurposed product through regional and global nonprofit agencies.
Ten years later, he has reached more than 20 million people with 80 million soap bars and counting while providing 180 life-sustaining jobs to women in developing nations. And he is doing it all from Pittsburgh, where he is exploring new ways to grow his social enterprise, EcoSoap, and seeking additional philanthropic support as he expands distribution in Western Pennsylvania and throughout the U.S.
He is also sharing his entrepreneurial experience with Pitt students as a mentor for the Big Idea Center, Pitt’s hub for student innovation and entrepreneurship, which was in its infancy during his time at Pitt, and now serves more than 1,500 students a year through its programs, events and competitions, helping them explore their own ideas for changing the world.
A Pitt Story, From the Start
Lakhani’s first trip to Cambodia grew out of a university research project supported by Mark Collins, a lecturer in environmental studies and geology, who helped Lakhani get access to rural villages. When Lakhani saw an opportunity to expand beyond research, the University didn’t hold him back. “I pivoted immediately, and they gave me the room to do that,” he says.
Pitt continued to play a role as the venture took shape. A nonprofit-management certificate program brought Lakhani into fundraising coursework taught by Dave Copelan, adjunct faculty in the School of Public and International Affairs and the School of Social Work. At the same time, Ward Allebach, an instructor in the Department of Geology and Environmental Science, sharpened his thinking on sustainability.
The turning point came in 2017, just two years into operations, when Lakhani was named a CNN Hero. “That was a viral moment for us,” he says. “It gave us a huge lift, and that’s when it took off at Pitt.”
The University’s chancellor began citing the story in commencement speeches; Lakhani was invited to speak on panels through the University Center for International Studies, the Big Idea Center, and the Mascaro Center for Sustainable Innovation, and into sustainability and business classrooms across campus. He now returns the favor, mentoring students directly. “The Big Idea Center is a symbol for paying it forward,” he says. “If you consider Pittsburgh as an incubator for these kinds of ideas, there’s an obligation to give back to it.”
Rhonda Schuldt, director of the Big Idea Center, met Lakhani around the time he launched EcoSoap and has followed his journey from curious student to fearless change agent. It was students like him she had in mind when launching the center’s two-part ChangeMaker program in 2024.
The ChangeMaker Series is a free, five-session masterclass open to all Pitt students, postdocs, and UPMC residents. Participants explore human-centered design, social innovation, and entrepreneurial thinking alongside guest speakers and a cohort of peers. Completing it earns a certificate and eligibility for the ChangeMaker Scholar Recognition Program, a longer-term (1.5–2 year) track that adds a certificate of achievement, graduation regalia, and a portfolio students can use with employers.
“We don’t expect every ChangeMaker to build the next EcoSoap. We simply want to give them the same thing Samir had — permission to take an idea seriously, and the tools support to see where their journey might lead, and the confidence that they have the power to create positive impact in the world,” Schuldt said.
From Factory Reject to Lifesaving Bar
EcoSoap’s raw material is waste that global manufacturers like Unilever, Procter & Gamble, and Colgate-Palmolive would otherwise send to a landfill. About 1 percent of what large soap factories produce fails quality control checks and is discarded, even though it’s still perfectly usable — a figure that adds up to an estimated 40,000 metric tons of scrapped soap worldwide each year. EcoSoap collects it and reconstitutes it into new, saleable bars.
The work is more industrially complex than it sounds. “Every time we pick up a truckload, the product is different,” Lakhani says. “We have to reformulate it and create a consistent product on the back end that passes quality control.” In Cambodia, the organization sources scrap soap from factories across Japan, Korea, China, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Indonesia; in Nepal, from India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan. “You can boil us down to logistics,” he says. “We punch well above our weight in manufacturing sophistication.”
The finished product is also designed with a specific problem in mind. In parts of Africa, Lakhani says, families often bathe with harsh laundry detergent because that’s what is available and affordable — not a product meant for skin. EcoSoap’s bars are formulated as a gentler alternative that works for both hand-washing and bathing. “We compete with factories all over the world, and competition is good,” he says. “We’re chasing the bottom of the pyramid, which is not something most consumer goods companies pursue. Their products are filled with detergents to maximize profit. We would rather break even than hurt anyone.”
The Math of Going Cheap on Purpose
The scale of both the problem and the opportunity is enormous. An estimated 2 billion people worldwide still cannot afford soap, according to Lakhani, even though the World Health Organization and UNICEF’s 2021 State of the World’s Hand Hygiene report found that national hand-hygiene investment can return $16 to more than $35 in healthcare savings and avoided economic disruption for every dollar spent.
EcoSoap now recycles roughly 10 million bars of soap a year, a volume that has let the organization reach new milestones in the number of people it serves. Today, about 180 employees — most of them women — run recycling operations in Sierra Leone, Tanzania, Nepal, and Cambodia, and the finished soap reaches people in 45 countries through shelters, food banks, and disaster-relief partners. Lakhani’s own portfolio, as he describes it, is almost entirely about reaching the hardest-to-serve places on earth: “My whole job is supply chain and manufacturing, and clearing customers in some of the most difficult places — Gaza, Ukraine, the world’s largest refugee camp.”
“The voices of the 180 women we employ keeps me going.” — Samir Lakhani
Employment as the Point, Not the Side Effect
EcoSoap could run leaner. Instead, it pays the women who staff its recycling facilities roughly 150 percent of the local minimum wage and helps finance their debt — a deliberate choice, Lakhani says, over a more conventional, margin-focused approach. He describes his own title, half-joking, as “chief Eco-Soap officer,” overseeing a roughly 10-person management team based in Pittsburgh and elsewhere in the U.S., with country operations run as their own subsidiaries.
What keeps him motivated, he says, is less the mission statement than the raw scale of the waste problem itself. By his estimate, EcoSoap currently captures only about 5 percent of the global soap-waste stream — meaning the vast majority of what factories discard still ends up in landfills. Closing even a fraction of that gap, he says, would mean building out capital, philanthropic support, and a much larger publicity push to persuade more soap factories to stop wasting their product. “The word is spreading,” he says. “Our bottleneck is philanthropic capital to get to that stage.”
“If people were looking for a way to save lives in a cost-effective manner, like providing soap, now is the time to do that.”
A Harder Fundraising Climate
That bottleneck has grown more urgent this year. Lakhani says EcoSoap, like much of the global humanitarian sector, has been severely affected by U.S. cuts to USAID funding, which he says have depleted humanitarian budgets by roughly 40 percent industry-wide, resulting in deep cuts to programs for malaria prevention, HIV prevention, and water, sanitation, and hygiene programs that “vanished overnight.” His conclusion is that private philanthropy needs to fill the gap. “If people were looking for a way to save lives in a cost-effective manner, like providing soap, now is the time to do that,” he says.
Coming Home to Pittsburgh
A decade in, Lakhani says the organization’s next strategic focus is close to home. “Our strategy now is to raise the profile in the Pittsburgh community,” he says. “We want to invite as many conversations with alumni as we can and build the most robust hygiene delivery program in Western Pennsylvania.” Regional funders — including the Posner Foundation, the Jack Buncher Foundation, the Tippins Foundation, and the Heinz Family Foundation — have already supported the effort, and Lakhani is hoping to deepen distribution partnerships with organizations such as Global Links, Casa San José, and the Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank.
The need isn’t only overseas. Federal food-assistance benefits through SNAP don’t cover the cost of hygiene items, Lakhani notes, which means hygiene poverty is also a chronic, systemic issue in Pittsburgh and across the country — not just in the villages where EcoSoap got its start.
“Some people are naturally innovative and entrepreneurial. Samir is one of those people, and his story illustrates what’s possible when someone who sees opportunities for change is given the space, encouragement ,and support to pursue them.” — Rhonda Schuldt, Director, Big Idea Center
Back on campus, Lakhani has become something of a living case study for the University’s innovation and entrepreneurship programs, including the Big Idea Center’s ChangeMakers series, which gives students room to visualize and explore their own ideas the way Lakhani once did. “There are a lot of generous people here who are genuinely interested in having an impact, both around the world and right here at home,” he says. “We feel an obligation to pay it forward in Pittsburgh.”
Ten years on, Lakhani doesn’t pretend the business makes conventional sense.
“I don’t think any sane business person would pursue this product,” Lakhani says of the venture, now marking a decade in operation. “I want to make the world’s cheapest product for the world’s poorest people. It is a strange entrepreneurial journey, but an important one nonetheless.”
For those interested in supporting EcoSoap’s mission, learn more.
Pitt faculty and staff who work with student innovators and entrepreneurs, contact the Big Idea Center to learn how those students can get involved in supportive programs and competitions.