The overwhelming plastic waste Hawaii visitors leave behind

Hawaii saw more than 9 million visitors last year. Those tourists’ first stops are often big-box and convenience stores, where they buy bottled water, plastic sand toys, single-use bodyboards, noodles, floaties and inner tubes for their trips. 

Plastics like in-room toiletries provided by resorts, plus to-go containers and cutlery provided by restaurants, are used and discarded by guests day after day. A single hotel chain can use hundreds of millions of little bottles of shampoo and conditioner every year.

When visitors leave, a lot of these items end up in the trash, yet Hawaii doesn’t have the infrastructure to recycle the immense amount of plastic left behind. 

“Remember that you’re visiting an island; whatever you ‘throw away’ here doesn’t have anywhere else to go,” Billy Middleton, a Hawaii Island-based ocean technology engineer and conservation photographer, told SFGATE. “‘Away’ is right around the corner and often ends up in the ocean.” 

“The way that our waste collection systems are set up and our behaviors, a lot of those materials end up in the marine environment, they end up in the land,” Jennifer Milholen of the Kokua Hawaii Foundation told KHON-TV. The foundation estimates that 70% of the ocean’s plastic pollution comes from the land.

In Hawaii, once collected, plastics are either consumed by progressively fuller landfills in the islands or shipped off island on fuel-consuming marine vessels for processing elsewhere. For example, Kauai’s landfill is expected to reach capacity in 2027. If limited places exist to recycle plastics on the islands, and landfills are reaching capacity, plastic pollution has nowhere else to go.

“Yes, plastic is cheaper, but only when you don’t incorporate the clean-up costs. If there isn’t a pono [responsible] way to dispose of it on the island, then what are we doing allowing it?” Megan Lamson, president of the Hawaii Wildlife Fund, told SFGATE.

Hawaii has made some progress in reducing plastic waste. On Oahu, plastic bags and disposable food service ware have been banned. Maui, the first island to prohibit plastic shopping bags in 2011, has also been making great strides in preventing single-use plastic usage. In 2022, Maui bans on both polystyrene bodyboard sales and plastic disposable food ware went into effect. 

Middleton suggests that visitors help by bringing reusable water bottles and shopping bags and by renting quality gear for water play while in Hawaii versus purchasing the non-recyclable PVC floats, which are made for pool use versus natural settings. 

Visitors can also bring or purchase a reusable, eco-friendly cutlery set and refuse single-use plastics at restaurants, such as takeout containers, straws and utensils. They can also research lodging and activities that are actively lessening their environmental footprint in advance.

“People come here because it’s beautiful; it just seems so obvious that you’d want to keep it beautiful and leave it better than you found it,” Marina Scott, a coordinator for the Surfrider Foundation’s Rise Above Plastics program, told SFGATE. The program was launched in 2021 as a way to raise awareness about the issue among local companies, resorts and visitors to Hawaii.

She explains the impact by visitors can be staggering in terms of how much plastic they use while on vacation, sharing that the average stay in Maui is about 10 days. With just under 3 million visitors to Maui in 2022 alone, Scott asks people to imagine if each visitor used two plastic water bottles per day. Approximately 60 million plastic water bottles that too often struggle to end up in a recycling bin would be added to Maui’s waste annually. And that’s not including non-recyclable, petroleum-based flotation devices and beach toys purchased for entertainment purposes. 

The largely volunteer-based team provides reusable water bottles to resorts, such as the Residence Inn Maui Wailea and AC Hotel Maui Wailea, and works with them to educate their guests in advance on their sustainability practices. 

Individuals can help prevent further plastic pollution through their purchasing decisions and refusals, but, she says, the onus is on those responsible for manufacturing and distributing petroleum-based products without a disposal plan.

“For the last 40 years, this issue has been on the shoulders and has been a burden on consumers and local municipalities,” Lauren Blickley, the Surfrider Foundation’s Hawaii regional manager, told SFGATE. “It’s time to shift it back and put it on the producers who have the opportunity to improve their products and make them less plastic-intensive.”

The state is trying to make headway with this issue. House Bill 1326, for example, passed in March to help the state transition to a “zero solid waste economy.” Another bill, House Bill 85, proposes banning hotel toiletry bottles.

“When people come to Hawaii and see our bans in place, they realize that these are things that are very easy to do and actually support the environment yet don’t take away from your experience,” Blickley says. “I hope these are ideas they can take back home and help them spread.”