Adopt A Highway

The Fairmont Orchid has adopted a 3 mile stretch of the highway near our hotel. Now most companies who adopt a highway typically pay a company to do the quarterly clean up. Not Us!

I was able to participate in this month's clean up session. We had about 30 people volunteer their time after work to pick up rubbish along the highway. Some of the challenges is that this stretch of highway is actually on the route to the rubbish dump. You can imagine some of the rubbish that flies off people's trucks as they are headed toward the dump. There's also lovely kiawe bushes which love to attack people with their thorns.

Instead of just bagging up everything, we made sure to separate rubbish from recycle items. My goal was to make sure the recycle bag was more full than my rubbish bag...and mission accomplished.

Besides finding the usual suspects: cigarette butts, bottles, cans; we also found tires, lots of road reflectors, doors, and huge planks of wood. One thing that was new to me was the plastic containers and Styrofoam. Because these items had been subjected to the sun, they seemed to be in tack, but as soon as I tried to pick it up, it would disintegrate. Not in a full sense that it completely disappeared, but disintegrated into small unmanageable pieces. Unmanageable for me to collect, but easily to be digested by animals.

You don't need to be a part of an official Adopt A Highway crew to do your part in helping. Its as easy as picking up some rubbish when you're out and about. I make a point while I'm at the beach to check my area for any rubbish that can be removed. Again, every little bit counts.