The Kohala Center and Thoughts About Hawaiian Ingenuity

In this week's Honolulu Weekly, there's an article about The Kohala Center on Big Island. It talks about how the community on Big Island began to meet and have a community conversation about what they wanted to improve and change in their community. From these discussions the idea came that by focusing on the island as an educational resource (wait, stop--the entire island--as an educational resource), the island could improve youth education, skilled employment at better pay for locals, and economic diversity. All this without becoming a tourist mecca or industrial wasteland. In it's geological rarity, locational uniqueness, geographic isolation, and in it's path towards sustainability and self sufficiency, Big Island is made for research modeling. The amazing part of this intuitive leap of thought is that, in order to continue to be an intellectual commodity, the island must continue to bushwack an interesting and promising path through all of its inherent challenges. Its value as a model is enhanced by the community's ability to create and manifest its own ideals in an ecologically wise way. I absolutely love this.

Furthermore, here's a gem of a quote for Garbage Craft from Matthews Hamabata, the director of The Kohala Center, as quoted from a Honolulu Weekly article entitled, "Kohala Nui--Education, environment, and empowerment on the Big Island": "Wouldn't it be great if we didn't see waste as waste but rather as an input for the agricultural system or our build environment? Outputs of one industry could be the inputs of another. We would maximize efficiency for greater energy and food self-reliance, capture dollars, and keep them on the island and create jobs."

I have thought a lot about this subject, especially lately, as I do this blog. One thing that I envision is to make regular calls to yellow pages buisnesses and investigate what their garbage is like, whether it's something they are willing to part with (or if there are legal barriers, protocol barriers, or govt regulations preventing this sort of thing for specific buisnesses), and what could be creatively done with such products. A next step i see would be to have several standard garbage craft projects figured out. A third step would be to begin interacting with the community on a volunteer basis.

Two ways I picture doing this are 1) in schools, as a recycling education program/craft class and 2) working with poor populations--for instance, temporary housing communities, poverty safety-net programs. In the latter I could do something like startup a workers co-opt in the same way a program like Food Not Bombs is organized. The workers would form a company, they would figure out the interests they had and the kind of crafts they wanted to make, and then they would investigate a cast-offs based supply chain for getting these items. If it needed more structure than this, it might be possible to mentor for a series of craft classes/brainstorming sessions where we worked with certain goods and tried to think of useful creative applications.

Just going to the yellow pages from A-the very beginning of D, I see, and can get creatively excited about the potential refuse of: abrasives companies, acousticals, airbrush, air conditioners, aircraft equipt/ground support/rebuilding, welding and metal works, tailoring, dry cleaners, animal hospitals, appliance repair, aquarium supply stores, artificial limbs/eyes, bishop museum, auto repair, auto detail, bakeries, baloons, bamboo products, barbers, barrels and drums, bars, bathroom remodelijng, beauty salon, bicycle repair, billiard equiptment, binderies, blinds, boat repair, boilers, bowling, breweries, bridal shop, building supply, butcher, buttons, cakes, caligraphers, car wash, carnival equiptment, carpet llayer, ceiling cleaning, cement, ceramics, chairs and tables, chemist, child care, china and glassware, cigar dealer, clock repair, cctv,clowns,painters, coffee, compost, computer parts, concrete blocks, contact lenses, roofing, tree service, propane, copiers, cosmetics, costumes, countertops, country clubs, cruiseships, curtains, cushions, crystals, cutlery, dairy...and so on. I mean, what could I do with: castoff sandpaper or wire bristle brushes, leftover paint, metal ducts, spent airfilters, dog hair, broken stoves, aquarium glass and so on? A lot I imagine.

Kids could think of tons of things I'm sure. It would be like their favorite art class ever. Adults might take hints from the kids, or they might be given categories to think about and elaborate on...like garbage gardening, scrap welding, tinker tin work, glass art/craft, weaving, box making, rug making, shed building, garden ornament building, furniture repair/overhaul/crafting, mosaic making, composting, sign painting, dying, computer tech work, carving, etc. This is what I'm interested in. Kudos to Matthews Hamabata and his Center, for being of a like mindset. I am inspired by what Hawaii has the potential to become.

Le Tour De Trash

So I wanted to hi-light this little tour. The Department of Environmental Services here in Hawaii is running a total of six tours over the course of this next year, and has designed the *FREE* tours to demonstrate how certain (for the most part large scale) buisnesses creatively manage their recycling. It also gives participants a tour of the waste water management plant(which sounds actually really cool, as opposed to boring--as in my memories of a 5th grade field trip boring--mostly because fyi, WWM here in Hawaii recycles sewage sludge into fertilizer pellets, aand uses some high tech video monitoring to keep close track of its sewage system status... wayy cool...and wayy important for the survival of this little island)

Island Shell (a local company that pulverizes used tire rubber and reuses it as compost and even--gasp--burns it for electricity),

Island Demo(which actually reuses a lot of building components, I assume for public projects, by onsite breakdown and later warehousing of useful materials),

Schnitzer Steel Hawaii (which smashes things haha! smash smash! it smashes fridges, it smashes cars, it smashes whateva you got, that's metal, and then sells? it back into the market for use...I'm a little bit blurry on what this means, but i gotta love that they smash stuff! :),

Automotive Equiptment Services (for the city of Honolulu, they recycle batteries and all kinds of car related stuff, but the cool thing I noted was that they also recycle the *water* used to wash the fleet of city vehicles...which probably amounts to quite a bit of liquid actually),

Waimanalo Gulch Sanitary Landfill (a controversy always surrounds the location and management of a landfill...here on Oahu that controversy has ended in the decision to move the landfill around every few years, so that no community is 'stuck' with it for too too long...right now it resides in Waimanalo...the cool things--to me--about this landfill is that they do methane recovery, and protect the ground from leaching garbage juice)

Pacific Biodiesel (which utilizes spent cooking oil, and makes it into biodiesel...we all have heard by now of biodiesel...what's cool about this here in Honolulu is that, unbeknownst to me, city AES vehicles use a B20 blend, which means 20% biodiesel--nice!)

and Hawaiian Earth Products (which recycles green waste into compost and mulch).

All of this is just awesome. Hawaii has a long way to go towards environmental sustainability, and we should be by now the forerunner of all US states in the category of eco-conscious practices--this includes recycling and careful management of our opala (the hawaiian word for refuse), this also includes the use of alternative energies, and finally the conscientious and careful diminishment of pollutants to our fragile environment.

This trash tour shows an enthusiasm at the state level for green friendly trash management. Excellent. What I wish I could see in this tour is a bit more of a user-friendly dimension. I wish DES was going to smaller buisnesses, running micro tours or recycling mixers, where small buisnesses could catch the creative recycling bug. I wish DES had incentive and grants programs that hilighted such buisnesses. I also wish that this tour had practical components like how to recycle your own company wide waste water, or how to grow a roof top garden...although, I think the visit to Hard Rock Cafe, for instance, which will show how they created a customer-friendly recycling sort..that's pretty good...and the visit to the drycleaners that recycles hangers, and the visit to Gyotaku Japanese Restaurant (which has a recycling program at work), these may prove to be excellent components of the tour. I dunno. I guess I'd like to check and see what Gyotaku is doing. As for the tour, I'm definitely checking it out. You should too. There's even a virtual tour online.

http://www.opala.org/solid_waste/Tour_de_Trash.htm