How Hotel Waste Becomes Shelter Support (The Hidden Problem) | May Wang Part 1

Welcome to the Legacy All-Stars Podcast. We feature inspirational stories from people who dedicate themselves to helping others. Here is your host, Alan Pavlosky.

Hey everybody, welcome to another episode of the Legacy All-Stars Podcast, where we celebrate athletes, leaders, changemakers, all who are using their talents, influence, and experience to make the world a better place. I'm your host, Alan Pavlosky. There are certain problems in the world that exist right in front of us, hiding in plain sight. Every single day, hotels across the country, and the world for that matter, are discarding thousands of perfectly useful sheets, blankets, and towels. Not because they're unusable, but because they no longer meet the standard of what they need for their quality control, which is understandable. At the same time, just miles away, there are people, families, and even animals in shelters without access to something as basic as warmth and comfort. Same communities, completely different realities. And the question becomes, who's willing to connect those dots? That's exactly what Mei Wang has done. Mei is the co-founder of Linens in Love, an organization transforming overlooked waste into meaningful impact by connecting hotels with shelters in need What started as a childhood experience has grown into a scalable, tech-enabled platform, a bridge between excess and need. May, welcome to the show. It's great to see you.

Thank you so much for having me.

Yeah, my pleasure. You know, I want to hear about the backstory because you and I spoke previously, and I was really enthralled at the backstory of what created this kind of thought process for you. So take us back to your early exposure to the hospitality world And what did you see growing up that most people wouldn't notice?

Absolutely. I think that's a wonderful question. And to start, when my dad first immigrated over to the United States, his first job was working the night shift at a local motel. And that was very, very unique because while a lot of people think of a hotel as a gateway to vacation, I grew up seeing it as this collection of a lot of different operational limits. Other kids were playing in the lobby, but I was in the back of house playing and building different blanket forts in the breakfast room and just being able to develop this new perspective that of this guest experience really. And it was when I was learning while building these blanket forts that the blankets that I was playing with, they were all meant to be discarded. Hospitality industry calls these soiled linen, and it could be really anything from as small as like the guest checks out, there's a coffee stain, there's a pen mark. That designates them to be landfill-bound. So it's very interesting because, you know, my dad's first entrepreneurial endeavor afterwards was managing a desert motel that was over 100 miles away from home, which means we didn't really see him a lot growing up. But he would return on Sundays for a quick family dinner with just trunks filled with a lot of linens that were considered too stained for guests. And those were the sheets that I grew up sleeping on, my family grew up sleeping on. And that really put into me this ethos that value is such a relative terminology and waste is oftentimes actually abundance just placed in the wrong location. So that was a lot of what I got to see through this industry and understanding that there is a waste of, of perfection really with an industry-wide fixation on brand standards leading to this disposal of billions of pounds of hospitality waste. And logistics too, as this root of scarcity, where scarcity in our communities is not just a lack of supply, but really oftentimes it can be a failure of logistics because like you mentioned, the blankets are there. We just don't have the infrastructure yet to connect them.

Yeah, for sure. You know, when did that whole concept shift for you? Again, you've explained it so thoughtfully, but when did it shift from being normal to something that didn't feel right for you?

Yeah. Well, the first ever delivery we had decided, because it wasn't born to just say like, oh, we'll create a whole organization. I mean, we were children. I was 14 at the time. So the vision really was just, this is a lot of waste. It feels uncomfortable. It feels intrinsically wrong. What can we do and what do we care about? And at that time, our dog, our family dog that we had adopted, she was abandoned at that motel that my dad was working at. And as children, you feel incredibly disempowered when you learn that a lot of animals that end up in the shelter system, many won't make it out of there alive. And when we understood that, the first location we wanted to bring it to was to an animal shelter. So got together a lot of our friends, loaded in these, you know, vans and vans filled with these linens for the dogs and the cats. And as we were unloading that, it was a dear friend of mine who had approached me and he said, hey, Quick question, May, are we just doing this for animal shelters? And I had asked, no, like, why? What did you have in mind? And that's when he confided in the whole group and basically shared, well, my dad walked out on the family. We don't have a home right now and we are living in a homeless shelter. And what's really concerning is that every night I'm watching as my sisters and my mom, we are sleeping on these bare rubber mattresses. They don't have the budget for linens. And I was wondering, "If you would consider next time we can bring these over to the family shelter." It was incredibly elucidating because I had never even realized or thought to myself that homelessness has so many different complex layers of what that can look like and what the resources look like in terms of constrained spaces or the fact that it would influence people like my friend in high school. And that's when we started realizing like, yes, we're going to come together. It's such a personal thing and people started coming forward and sharing their stories of, you know, their parents or their family who are in senior housing, people who had come out of vet clinics and explained that the vet clinics really, really need these for surgeries, so on and so forth. So a lot of lived experiences that transformed this into, you know, from a group of ragtag kids into a club, from a club into more chapters across, you know, the California region. And then from that into realizing, hey, we should incorporate this as a nonprofit. We should figure out how to scale this because anywhere that there's a lot of abundance in communities, there's also a lot of need.

Absolutely. Wow. Tell me how you and your sister turned the awareness of what you experienced into action and give me the breakdown of how it all kind of transpired.

Yeah, I would say that the beginning is that was— that story is the why and the question is the how. So I did mention earlier my little sister and I, it was a trunk project, right? It really was. Just kids, their parents' cars. We were manually bridging that gap between excess and need. And we started with a lot of persistent outreach of cold calling, just picking up the phone, calling local hotels, giving the pitch, calling local shelters, you know, being that bridge. And we proved that that model really did have this need and it was working. And I think the biggest change and the shift that started happening was during COVID When COVID hit, we got so many emails from children around the world that were asking us and saying, "Hey, like, you know, my internship got canceled, the offer was rescinded, the volunteer program that I wanted to be a part of has shifted." And we started understanding, actually, if this is a model that is needed with need and abundance happening really anywhere, 'cause this is an industry-wide situation and a practice, what if we were able to scale this impact? So we started by creating something that we call the Global Leadership Program. Basically bringing together, you know, think kids in a minivan, but instead of the neighborhood, they were from Ireland, from Sri Lanka, from Korea. And we joined together with these regular seminars and sessions about crafting the first elevator pitch, spotting what community needs looks like, how to take this initiative and the spirit of it, of, you know, spotting abundance, spotting waste, and spotting community needs and taking that first step. And giving the spirit of that into— and now you can make it your own. So that was where the first touch with scale actually began. And as a result of that level of kind of that global expansion, we were able to scale the network to redistribute over 70,000 linens across 15 countries and over 120 different shelters around the world.

Yeah, super impressive. Let's take a step back and talk about the problem and the contrast. How significant really is the waste coming out of the hospitality industry?

Oh my gosh, it's massive. It's massive. And, you know, it really just depends from size to size. But the industry itself will generate over 6 billion pounds of waste each year. And that's a fairly conservative number, specifically from EPA in the United States. So the specifics of that is just, you know, the reason of it. And we understand it's not necessarily because they're being shredded apart, but they just don't meet the specific brand standards anymore, despite the fact that they are maybe 95% functional.

Probably more high quality than somebody would have access to, frankly.

Yes, absolutely. I, I, I've oftentimes joked that, you know, the sheets I sleep on from IKEA, the same ones for several years, they're not nearly as nice as the ones that get thrown away. But exactly. And, you know, most recently, like just last week alone, we have this a hotel that's an independent hotel in Cambridge, Massachusetts. They contacted us. And we set them up with several different shelters. But then they emailed and said, we have a small problem, May. So these shelters picked up like 20 boxes of blankets and towels. We still have 100 that we had to throw away on a regular basis. So I think it's just important to point out, though, that this is about systemic inertia. It's not a lack of desire of help. It's not this kind of cold-hearted, light it all on fire. It's simply a failure of systems. And, you know, a lot of procurement departments will reject partnerships because they're tethered to a lot of KPIs that are rewarding that lowest upfront cost and not necessarily thinking about what we need to invest into when it comes to this, like, long-term return on investment or long-term community impact.

Yeah, for sure. What have you seen in shelters that really highlights the need? Can you give me some examples?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I want to start by saying that the need in shelters is oftentimes, it's misunderstood. We think sometimes, oh, maybe it's a lack of charity. The reality is that it really is also a lack of reliable infrastructure. So with some numbers off the cuff is in the US alone, the scale, let's think about that. United States, we have over 1.5 million people who have experienced homelessness last year. And a lot of these shelters are operating on shoestring budgets and lacking a lot of budgets for basic bedding because they have to make an analysis and allocate the funding towards very essential different needs. The anecdote that I shared earlier, when my friend became homeless, he and his family had to sleep on these bare rubber mattresses because the shelter didn't have that funding for sheets. And because there's no formalized bridge between hospitality surplus and community needs. These shelters oftentimes will pay thousands of dollars for blankets that hotels maybe blocks away are paying to throw into the dumpster. And I have spoken to a lot of these executive directors from shelters and they say, "We really try to make this work. We are driving out to Ross, to TJ Maxx. We're driving out to warehouses to see if there's clearance. Whatever is on clearance sale, I will try to buy up as much as I can." sometimes with, you know, people's own personal funding too, if they can do what they can. And there's so many layers of this because there's also operational burnout. A lot of shelters are drowning in this manual work because they don't have the technical skills to coordinate things efficiently. And they're not necessarily thinking, you know, I just need constant one-off donations. They are really needing this level of reliability and something that's a little bit more of an automated supply chain that is ultimately providing dignity at scale.

Yeah. All right. We've identified the problem and the scale of that problem and some of the excesses that lead to it. Let's talk about the solution. Break down the concept of what has been referred to as DoorDash for Linens, if you will, and how does it work?

Yeah. So the idea of DoorDash for Linens, or, you know, we had called it just the Linens and Love app, was when we started realizing that, you know, we are just drowning. We're drowning in a lot of manual coordination. The pain started really happening too when I was waking up to these inboxes. Our main inbox was filled with hundreds of emails and it was shelters in Minnesota, you know, asking for help and saying, "Hey, like, we really need blankets. The winter is coming and we don't have anything." And then me having to say something along the lines of, "Oh my gosh, this is really challenging because we don't have,", you know, volunteers based in Minnesota. And then another hotel in Bali explaining like, hey, we are throwing away a lot of blankets here in Indonesia. Can someone help us with getting these out to organizations in need? And we started understanding that, you know, if it's getting to a point where I'm almost psychologically noticing I'm subconsciously avoiding this inbox because it feels so disempowering and overwhelming, just the sheer scale of it, we need to figure out a way to just improve the solution. And that is not by answering more emails and doing even more manual coordination intensely. It is through finding the tech that can do that. And so what we decided to do was put together the first team that focuses really specifically on building an app. And what our app does is quite simply, like you said, the DoorDash for linens. It is, you know, connecting these shelters that register with us with the local hotels that are discarding these blankets and towels and matching them with an algorithm based specifically on proximity of the ability to be connected and also availability so that it is a regular systemic notification and prompting between these parties. And basically by interviewing a lot of these stakeholders and enlisting the help of our technical team, we were able to build the app and transform this broken, you know, weeks-long manual process into like a streamlined digital infrastructure. Amazing. So that's what we do.

Yeah. So let's break it down. What happens when a hotel and Shelter successfully connected?

When they're successfully connected, the hotel is able to think about the outcomes not just as charity, but also this win for, you know, brand equity and community health. The shelter is able to kind of go in there and receive this huge amount of supply. My favorite, my favorite most recent email that I got was from a shelter in Columbus, and the director had said, he says like, "I feel like we are Christmas in April right now." And so that is one of the outcomes, you know, showing up and being able to load up these huge amounts of bedding because, you know, they oftentimes, the shelters, the struggle is, they get this huge injection of blankets when we think about charity during the holiday season. And then April hits and you are struggling again with the lack of resources. So that is one thing that happens. The shelters have Christmas in July, Christmas year-round. With the shelter and the hotel then, what happens for the hotels? Well, there's the feel-good component. You know, the team themselves are seeing the way that they are able to make a difference directly. And that's what I think about a lot is that doing good is intrinsically an inconvenient thing. It requires you to think about what is the status quo and what is going wrong. And you are not rewarded necessarily with bonuses or KPIs by doing good. But instead, I really do believe that humans are so intrinsically altruistic. And for the hotel side, the team sees that what they're doing really does directly touch the community. And that they're so empowered to take something that initially is kind of a disempowering feeling, like imagining taking trays of buffet food and scraping it into the dumpster or throwing all these blankets and towels into the dumpster, transforming that into something that's real. And on top of that, we also see the fact that we are cutting down on a lot of operational needs. So there are waste disposal costs in terms of the fact that hotels were throwing away these very high-volume things, but also the workflow for housekeeping and the actual team of hauling things down from, you know, storage closets to the actual bins. Now we have somebody who can kind of go in there and grab them straight from storage closet and distribute these out. So there's no additional time and energy. Yeah.

Yeah. Win-win. I love that. You know, I love that you talked about people's altruistic nature in general. I'm a believer in that. I'm a kind of an eternal optimist in that way. And I believe that people, will do good if they're given the opportunity to, to make it so that it's not overwhelmingly challenging to do so. It's rarer when you see people that are wanting to do good that do it even if it is inconvenient. And I think that's what's so powerful about what you and your sister have done here and what the rest of your team has done here is that it's amazing to contribute on that level and make a difference in so many people's lives and find innovative ways to deliver those solutions. So I'm a fan. For sure.

Thank you. You're so sweet.

What are the challenges that you face in scaling this technology?

Oh gosh. I would say just shifting the current SOP, shifting it and the education of this and the level of outreach at the very beginning. We spotted this gap in the way that the market is currently operating, and I think that most people assume that shelters just wait for donations, but the reality is that they're forced to spend thousands of dollars of precious grant money on essentially low-quality retail price blankets to meet the basic safety needs. Yeah. Um, and I think it's the challenge really is, are you willing to think creatively if we have this infrastructure in place to make it work? And there was a lot of that initial kind of hesitation, I would say, because, you know, if the standard is you try to do what you can. If you have extra budget, try to get the blankets and buy as much as you can from TJ Maxx or from clearance or whichever. The level of education that we start out with of saying, hey, we can make your budget go extra far simply by being able to pick these up, that is one thing. And what we found was after interviewing a lot of these shelter directors, shifting the language on our website as a result of that, and also shifting a lot of our procedure, because we have really come far from our initial MVP and testing out the pilot process. We have removed so much friction to the point that the outcome of it is we don't do any sort of outbound outreach anymore. 100% of our participation really comes from shelters Googling and looking for the solution of, "Where do I get blankets? Where can I get towels for my team?" And they come in. And I think there was another element, which is we validated within a month that shelters actually really prefer a small, reliable service fee over waiting for uncertain one-off grants or donations. And what was interesting for that was because for a fraction of what they were already spending, what we solved was a consistent, high-quality supply of linens that can give their residents a lot of dignity. Many of these shelters continue to operate at absolute zero when it comes to the linen budget. And so we've decided we're not charging them. We just want to subsidize them. So what we do is we understand that by creating a funded tech stack, we are eliminating a lot of the procurement costs for these shelters. And we have decided as a team that we are going to shift entirely to just a contribute what you can model. And that's what we call it, is just contribute what you can. It can be to hotels for helping alleviate their logistics and, you know, whatever it is that they want to do if they have extra budget. And it can be for shelters who are already in that thousands of dollars of budget. But what we see is that the shelter that operates in downtown Los Angeles does not have the same budget as the one that's in Minneapolis or in a small town in Iowa. So we understand sometimes that that adds to our own cost of doing this outreach and partnership development and maintaining the tech stack. But I think that has been a big challenge in the scale is being able to predict with certainty and reliability what that level of participation could look like.

This is the end of part 1 of a special 2-part episode with Linens in Love co-founder Mei Wang. I hope you enjoyed the show. Tune in next week to hear the second half of the show.