podcast final

The podcast discusses the involvement of Hawaii's government in addressing plastic pollution. The bans on plastic bags and the switch to eco-friendly alternatives have helped reduce pollution, but they have also negatively impacted small businesses like Zippy's. These businesses struggle with the increased costs of using eco-friendly materials. COVID-19 has further affected these businesses, leading to closures. The government faces a challenge in balancing the benefits to the environment and the impact on the economy. The speaker suggests implementing smaller changes, such as increasing trash cans on beaches, to address the problem without causing major disruptions. There is no simple solution, but collective effort is needed to find a balance between environmental protection and economic sustainability. Hey, welcome back to the podcast. Let's get right into it. In today's episode, we'll be talking about the involvement of Hawaii's government in the plastic pollution problem in Hawaii. As you may know, I was born and raised in Hawaii for the 18 years of my life. So this episode is close to home. Hawaii has dealt with plastic pollution for years. It's not a new problem that has just been discovered. It's been known. In the past, we've made progress by fully banning plastic bags in 2021, and continuing to use plastics in 2022. Now, these bans weren't introduced in those years. They were introduced in years prior, but it took three or four years to be fully involved into our system and become in full effect. Now, these bans, although they helped our environment, they impacted our small businesses. One of those businesses is Zippy's. Zippy's is a local food chain that has been affected by these bans, and it's an adjustment to get used to. These bans aren't just all positive. Like I said, our local businesses get affected. Now, think about it. A normal fork may cost for about $1,000, may cost around $20. And an equal friendly fork now costs around $40 for $1,000. That's double the price a business will have to spend on forks alone. Now, if you're Zippy's, it's not just about the forks. It's about the knives, the spoons, the straws, the containers, and the bags. Those are all being increased because you have to switch to these equal friendly plastics or these paper alternatives. All of those alternatives cost money. And it's not something that is really affordable for a lot of these small businesses. A close family friend of mine has actually had to close down because they just simply couldn't afford to switch to them. Among other things like COVID, that was definitely an impact to why they closed down. But it most definitely was not just because of COVID. It was because they were already sustaining, barely sustaining, just using these switches, switching into equal friendly plastics, paper bags, all that jazz. But when COVID came over and they were barely seeing a float, they just couldn't last anymore. And now I'm not blaming it fully on the bans. I really think they have helped reduce our plastic waste in the ocean and our beaches. Because studies have shown that in Hawaii, when there is no virus affecting our pollution, our pollution, our beaches got cleaner. An example of this is Hanauma Bay. Hanauma Bay, there's an organization there that they're friends of Hanauma Bay. They basically, they look over that area, they take care of it, they clean it. When COVID happened, lockdown happened. No one could go in or go out of their houses for 11, 12 months in Hawaii at least. Over five of those months, when no tourists were able to come, the residents of Hawaii were able to come back out, go to the beaches, enjoy what we have. And they have said, the president has said that when it was just the residents, our beaches were pretty clean. Once the tourists started trickling in, so did the pollution. And that is, that's not great because Hawaii's whole thing is tourism. That's how we make our money. And we can't just be like, no tourists. That means no money. And we kind of need money. So that's the conundrum that really Hawaii's government has to face whenever they do these bans. How much is it benefiting us versus hurting us? Is it affecting our environment so positively that even though it hurts our local businesses, which our local businesses like Zippy's makes us special, not just because of our land, but because Zippy's has our food culture in it. And that's special to us. Everyone on the island knows Zippy's. Everyone loves Zippy's. When it's 11pm after some practice, you go to Zippy's, you eat a loco moco, you eat something there. It's really good. It's a icon. But some of their source has to close down because of these changes. And they're prior to COVID. And I'm not saying that Zippy's, I don't know all their financial history. But I do know these things. They have 20 plus locations all across Hawaii. And they're very popular. Now, I don't know if these failures were just because of other things that we can't really know, or they're because of these bans and the switches they have to make. That's all just skepulation. And it's hard to know. But you can't deny that there's that these prices, these changes wouldn't affect a place like Zippy's. I think it probably would. And yes, you can argue that, hey, the Hawaii's government, they got to, even though they're thinking about our pollution problem, they also got to think about our, our economic states. And I say to that, that's very true. Our economic state in Hawaii relies on things like tourism, but also tourism relies on us. In the sense that if there's no culture to go to where it will attract all these people, where our beaches are so dirty, no one wants to come, we don't have some businesses that make us special anymore. We're just some island in the middle of the Pacific is what my fear is, what we might become because we lay waste to our beaches, we don't keep them clean. Our government is failing to do enough in my eyes, really, without impacting our environment, or negatively impacting our economy, and positively impacting our environment, they're not doing enough. Because they're doing, when they're doing one of those, they're hurting the others. When they're doing the other one, they're hurting the other. And that's just not really good. Because if we keep on hurting one to build the other, and then building the other one to hurt the other, we get nowhere. We end up in the same place we have been for many of years. And I think the solution, really, it's not a simple one. It's not one that can be just, I say this one thing, and it blows everyone's mind. If we just do it, then all our problems are solved. I wish it was that easy, but it's not. What we could do, and I really hope we will do in the future, is something as simple as adding more trash cans to our beaches, or taking them out more. I've been to the beaches a lot. I lived in Hawaii. I live in Hawaii. Every time I go to a beach, the trash cans are overfilling. The wind is blowing it all into the sea, all over the beach. No one can put trash anywhere anymore. It's just all in these overfilled trash cans that there's like two for this massive beach with a lot of people. I say if we simply either increase the pickup rates, or increase the amount of trash cans, and we still do the same amount of, if we just increase the amount of trash cans with the same amount of routes, and maybe just increase the workers a little bit, one more person, two more people, it will cost more money. But it's not going to affect as much as the other bands have probably done in the past. I think my whole point here is to just do these small things. Change those by doing simple things that it's not going to shock everyone. It's not going to take time to adjust. It's not going to take four or five years to implement and people get used to. And then even after that, the effects are still going on. These negative effects is what I'm talking about. Positive effects, great. I want those. Negative effects is the main concern. And I think if we just started doing small things here and there in the government, I think we would benefit a lot more than what we have been doing where two big bands, two massive shockwaves, it really does hurt. And I wish I knew more about the ins and outs of all our businesses and the whole government to be like, this is the solution that can fix all our problems. But there is none, like I said. And in truth, it's a collective problem that everyone has to go through and we all have to work through to finish and get through. And thank you for listening to my podcast. That was my whole spiel about Hawaii's government. Thank you for listening and you all have a wonderful day.