The New Sand: May Contain Plastic

The May 2009 issue of Hana Hou!—Hawaiian Airlines’ in-flight mag—includes an article called The Voyage of the Junk. The story is about a journey from California to Honolulu via the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The ship itself was a trash heap, made out of plastic garbage and leftover bits of a Cessna. The goal of the journey was to raise awareness of the impact that all the plastic crap we create, buy and use is having on the oceans.

There’s a particularly sad and telling passage in the story. Upon arrival in Honolulu, one of the sailors decided to find out how long it would take to pull a piece of plastic out of the water. He hopped overboard, and: “Less than a minute later he was out, holding up an ‘ABC Stores’ bag. ‘Thirty seconds,’ he said, with both triumph and distaste.”

Two years ago I walked the beach at Oahu’s Kualoa Point State Recreation Area, picking over bits of plastic—crazy straws and disposable cameras and pen bodies and toys and lots of lids from sports bottles. Maui County has a plastic bag ban but there’s no Hawaii-wide ban in place. There’s also plenty of churn on the other islands around bag bans—maybe they will, maybe they won’t. On my latest visit, I carried a backpack almost everywhere I went so it was no big deal to decline the bag and toss my groceries in with my sunscreen and camera and towel. The hotel didn’t offer the option to sort my own trash—I ended up tossing recyclables in the garbage nine times out of ten because there were no facilities to do otherwise.

Sadly, environmental sustainability didn’t leave much of an impression as a value in tourism during this last stay in the islands. Kauai seemed a little more switched on to the idea, a little greener—I picked up a Malama Kauai map (malama means “to care for”)—but in urban Honolulu and Waikiki, similar resources weren’t readily available.

Cultural sustainability is going full speed ahead, but maybe that’s because as tourists, we’ll pay for entertainment—arts, music, dance—but we won’t pay to do work of any kind, no matter how small. Perhaps, after we’ve shelled out for a plane ticket, a nine dollar mai tai, and an oceanfront room, we don’t expect to have to sort our paper from our plastic.

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