Department of Defense

HIARNG participated in its 1st Earth Day Beach Clean Up on 4/20/13. Thank you to all the volunteers for making this a huge success!  On April 20, 2013 the HIARNG Environmental Office partnered with Sustainable Coastlines Hawai‘i (SCH) to conduct a beach cleanup on 12 of our windward-side beaches on the island of O‘ahu. This was the largest Beach Clean Up in Hawaii History! The HIARNG-ENV office joined forces with Bellows Air Force Station to manage two beaches (Bellows Beach and Sherwood’s Beach) near our 298th Regional Training Institute in Waimānalo, O‘ahu.  There were close to 200 HIARNG Volunteers covering a couple miles of coastline. In total, the SCB Beach Clean Up event brought together 1,073 volunteers, collected approximately 4500 lbs of trash, and 780 lbs of recyclable materials.  A wide range of garbage, from car tires, fishing nets, broken glass bottles, to micro-plastic scraps were collected. The 700 lbs of recyclables collected will be shipped to a company called “Method” to be turned into plastic soap bottles that will be sold at Whole Food Markets around the state of Hawai‘i.  CNN did a report on this for Earth Day 2013 which aired internationally.  Please check out the short video   If the link doesn’t work, go on cnn.com and search “garbage into soap bottles.”  Again, A big mahalo to our volunteers and SCH for making it a huge success!