Beer cans, water bottles, and even trash bags made easy targets while dodging cars yesterday on Rice Street. Jolene Ogle of the Kaua‘i Marriott Resort and Beach Club said about 20 volunteers turned out to help clean up Rice Street
Beer cans, water bottles, and even trash bags made easy targets while dodging cars yesterday on Rice Street.
Jolene Ogle of the Kaua‘i Marriott Resort and Beach Club said about 20 volunteers turned out to help clean up Rice Street as part of World Cleanup Day.
“World Cleanup Day is a corporate event,” Ogle said. “Around the world, there are other Marriott properties doing the same thing in an effort to take care of our environment.”
A part of the United Nations Environment Program, Sept. 11 is recognized as the Clean Up the World weekend globally.
“Clean Up the World brings the focus squarely on us — as people, as agents of change,” Achim Steiner, Executive Director of UNEP, stated on the program’s Web site. “To all the members of Clean Up the World, I have one simple message: Thank you. Your actions truly make a difference.”
For Gaylene Palama, a pa‘u princess in many of the community parades celebrating Hawaiiana, and Sherri Sanchez-Holcomb, a former Miss Garden Isle as well as owner of Excel Dance Studios, the sight of the litter along Rice Street was discouraging as they dodged cars, trucks and buses that sped up the thoroughfare leading to the Lihu‘e business district.
“Somehow, it seems like we just pick up all this and by the time I drive by, someone will have tossed more on the road,” Palama said.
But it was part of a day’s work for the Marriott volunteers who, after cleaning the roadway from the resort’s entrance up until the Kapule Highway intersection, set their sights on the 18th Annual Chili Cookoff at the Kukui Grove Shopping Center.
Ogle said the clean up also coincided with the resort’s quarterly roadside cleanup under the state’s Adopt-a-Highway program.
