In the past few years, tourism, Hawaii’s No. 1 economic driver, has adopted greener, more sustainable ways of doing business and attracting visitors to boot.
GreenCar Hawaii (www.greencarhawaii.com) is a perfect case in point. The Princeville, Kauai-based company provides visitors interested in renting vehicles with "car-sharing" services. Instead of going to a "conventional" rental agency like an Avis where you’d rent a typical car long term, park it at the resort and then barely use it, GreenCar offers clean energy vehicles by the hour or day, directly from their hotel, time share or condo. These include all-electric, hybrid electric and high-mileage combustible-engine cars. The hourly rental fee includes insurance, fuel, unlimited mileage and even parking. Co-founder Justin McNaughton says, "You pay for what you need by the hour and tread lightly on the environment by keeping your carbon footprint at a minimum." GreenCar has locations at five hotels, with expansion plans statewide in 2013. Hourly rates vary from $15 to $20, with all-day rentals starting from $95.
Hawaii is on the leading edge of sustainable eco-resorts, and a property that illustrates this trend is Maui Eco Retreat (www.mauiretreat.com/main) near Paia, Maui. Owners Kutira and Raphael Décosterd have leveraged every conceivable technology to keep their six-room yoga and meditation center sustainable and off the grid. It is constructed of bamboo. Its electricity is provided by solar panels, and solar power also pumps up water from a 460-foot well fed by an underground aquifer. If the weather is too cloudy for the PV system to operate efficiently, they crank up their generator, which runs on biodiesel, derived from recycled vegetable oil. The PV system also powers a recording studio (and allows the couple to run their own record label, Kahua Records) on the property. No chemicals are used to maintain their lush grounds and vegetable garden, which are nourished from recycled organic matter and worm castings. (Even extra office paper is shredded and fed to the worms, and discarded food feeds the chickens.) The resort grounds also house a bee colony, which pollinates the fruit trees and allows the pair to harvest honey. Their one concession to the grid: a phone line that also serves as a DSL Internet connection.
Bamboo Living, a Paia-based company, is another example of a Hawaii company that has leveraged green technology to do some innovative things in the resort- and home-building industry. Focusing exclusively on bamboo as a major building material, the company’s management believes, can reduce global warming, restore the native forests of the world, protect watersheds and reduce top soil erosion. In addition to private homes, they have built three boutique properties in Hawaii including Maui Eco Retreat (featured above), Kalani Oceanside Retreat on Hawaii island and Haiku Springs Eco Resort, also on Maui. Bamboo offers a host of eco- and structural-friendly advantages to other types of wood and other materials. Chief among them is strength. Bamboo is as strong as mild steel with the compression strength of concrete. It’s termite resistant and sustainable. David Sands, chairman and chief architect of the company, says that bamboo needs only three years "from the chute till you get high-quality structural material" versus other types of wood, which take at least 20 years to mature. It’s also a great carbon sink. The company says that a 1,000-square-foot bamboo structure "embodies 20 tons" of carbon dioxide.
Hawaii’s harnessing of green technologies is not only helping to save the planet, it’s also bringing in tourism dollars. What’s not to like?
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Mike Meyer, former Internet general manager at Oceanic Time Warner Cable, now manages IT for Honolulu Community College. Reach him at mmeyer@hawaii.edu.
