Saturday Briefing

By Kimberly Agas

Island vacationers often pick up inexpensive grass beach mats, plastic body boards, and other “disposable” beach toys during their Hawaiian vacations and then discard them when it’s time to return home. The debris typically heads for the Island’s landfill, or worse, litters 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.

At the Outrigger Waikiki on the Beach (OWK), we now encourage our guests to “dump” these items in their hotel room and not the garbage bin, and our Housekeeping staff gladly collects them as part of the OWK’s eco-friendly efforts.

It all started last year when the Outrigger Waikiki was contacted by Kini Beach, 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. Our Housekeepers began collecting beach mats and plastics for Kini Beach, and some of the employees even checked the shoreline to pick up more refuse. There was so much stuff that Kini Beach 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 and paddle covers that are 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.

Our partnership with Kini Beach is just one part of the Outrigger Waikiki’s ongoing green program. For the last few years, we have donated the 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.

The 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.

Mahalo to everyone here at the Outrigger Waikiki who made this partnership with Kini Beach such a success. We can all be proud of the contribution we all make on a daily basis to maintaining Hawaii’s fragile environment and positioning Outrigger as an environmentally-responsible company.