Toiletries Amnesty actively achieves 6 of the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals.
The UN SDGs are an urgent call for action to end poverty and other deprivations while improving health, education, and inequality – while tackling climate change and working to preserve our environment. Find out more here.
At Toiletries Amnesty, tackling poverty and hygiene inequality is at the heart of what we do. With over 14 million people in the UK living in poverty and regularly struggling to afford hygiene essentials. We work to create easy access to hygiene essentials for those in need all around the world by directly connecting those who can help with people in need, ensuring that hygiene essentials get where they’re needed as soon as possible through our complex directory of organisations.
Hygiene products are an essential part of maintaining good mental and physical health. Without access, health and wellbeing can be heavily impacted, leading to serious health concerns. For example, lack of dental care can lead to gum disease. The effects of a lack of good health and wellbeing can also strongly affect self-esteem and mental health. By providing access to vital products such as toothpaste and brushes, soap, and sanitary products, we ensure that people have what they need, when they need it.
Toiletries Amnesty works with homeless shelters, women’s, and children’s’ refuges, mental health services, children and families’ centres, food banks, refugee support groups, NHS Trust services, schools, colleges, prison services, community groups, and other organisations that need our support to help reduce the level of inequality experienced by the varied social groups they support. We shouldn’t have to be in society where so many people are in need, but that’s the current situation, and the best we can do is to help others in any way we can.
Our mission is to alleviate hygiene poverty while reducing waste. We believe in considerate consumption and production and promote waste minimisation through redistribution of excess stocks of toiletries to people who do not have the means to access these basic products. Rather than asking people to donate brand new products, we want to give a new life to existing items, accepting donations of part-used products that are no longer wanted, and providing them to organisations that need as much help as possible as demand on their services rises.
We aim to tackle climate change through waste reduction, diverting plastic and products from landfill and incineration, and into the hands of people who need our support with access to essential hygiene products. In 2021 alone, we saved over 100 tonnes of plastic from landfill. Through our donation station, companies with excess stock can easily donate these items to organisations around the world, reducing the amount of waste they produce and helping communities in need access the essential products they require.
We work and partner with companies all over the world to create positive and practical solutions for the problems they have around waste and sustainability, all whilst connecting them with communities and consumers who want to see a change for good. We encourage our partners to consider how they can become more sustainable and environmentally-conscious in their practices, while supporting their local communities through donations of hygiene essentials and toiletries to organisations in need.