HONOLULU, OAHU, HAWAII—You’ve spent several glorious days playing in Hawaii and as you pack up to go home, you’re wondering: What to do with the beach floaties and body boards you’ve amassed during the trip? Well, if you’re into being green, and if you’re staying at the Outrigger Waikiki on the Beach, you should just “dump” them…in your hotel room, not the garbage bin. The oceanfront hotel’s housekeeping staff will gladly collect them as part of its eco-friendly efforts.
The hotel donates plastic beverage bottles collected from guest rooms to PACT (Parents and Children Together), a private, nonprofit family service agency that delivers a broad range of innovative social and educational services. Hawaii’s 5-cent bottle fee allows the nonprofit agency to recycle the containers in exchange for cash, and Outrigger Waikiki’s support helps ensure a steady supply of free bottles, while reducing the amount of trash headed for the landfill.
Until recently, air mattresses, inner tubes left behind in hotel rooms and on the beach were a greater environmental challenge. Island vacationers often pick up inexpensive grass beach mats, plastic body boards and other “disposable” beach toys, then discard them when it’s time to return home. The debris typically heads for the island’s landfill, or worse, litter the shoreline and ocean. By one estimate, there are enough mats and plastic beach toys dumped in Waikiki to fill 30 swimming pools a year.
‘Trash’ Converted into Useful Items
In 2008, the Outrigger Waikiki was contacted by David Watt of Kini Beach. He and his business partners had just started a new local venture seeking a way to convert beach trash into something useful. The hotel immediately jumped on board, and Outrigger Waikiki became the first hotel to donate its beach trash to the eco-entrepreneurs. The housekeepers began collecting beach mats and plastics for Kini Beach. Hotel staff combed the shoreline to pick up more refuse. There was so much stuff that Kini Beach’s founders found themselves picking up their “supply” as often as six days a week.
Today, Kini Beach’s eco-products include chic handbags and totes, and canoe/SUP paddle covers retailed in stores on Oahu, Maui and Kauai. The products are constructed from grass beach mats, lined with floaties, and accented with fabrics from body boards and umbrellas. According to Watt, “It takes a team to be green. Thank you, Outrigger Waikiki for all your help.” For more information on Kini Beach, log on to www.kinibeach.com.
Outrigger Waikiki also recycles cardboard and glass, and sponsors numerous guest activities and events that not only share some of Hawaii’s cultural heritage, but impart valuable information about how to protect the islands’ fragile eco-systems, including native forests, marine environment and such historic treasures as Hawaiian petroglyphs.
Go to Outrigger Waikiki.
