Bill Kirk sifts through the upper layers of three recycling bins, separating out the plastic water bottles and containers from the beds of loose newspaper on a recent Thursday morning.

“That’s the hardest part,” he says, tossing the plastic into another bin. “The human factor.”

Kirk is the chief steward at the Kahala Hotel & Resort. He’s also a member of the hotel’s volunteer “green team.”

A growing number of hotels are setting up teams like Kirk’s that consist of volunteer hotel associates whose mission is to put sustainable policies into action. The existence of these committees demonstrates that the nation’s hotel industry, like many other markets, is slowly but surely going green.

But aside from the Kahala and a few other hotels, that movement hasn’t quite gained momentum here.

“Hawaii probably needs to mandate changes to its citizens,” said Patty Griffin, president and founder of the national “Green” Hotels Association. “But hotels need to demand less and more recyclable packaging from mainland venders.”

Some mainland hotels recycle almost everything, from food scraps to miniature shampoo bottles.

Amid this conspicuous shift — and against the backdrop of Oahu’s struggles to site a new landfill — Civil Beat decided to look into what hotels in Hawaii are doing to conserve resources and reduce the amount of waste they generate.

Honolulu law requires that large businesses such as hotels recycle electronic waste, green waste and cardboard. Hotels meeting certain criteria are also subject to additional city ordinances, including food waste and glass container-recycling requirements.

We discovered that most, if not all, hotels in Hawaii comply with these requirements and hew to City and County of Honolulu recycling tips and guidelines, which include lists of various recycling companies. Many hotels separate their recyclable materials and leave them out for those companies to collect. But only a few, it seems, go past that.

The Kahala is one of the exceptions.

After dividing up the mixed recyclables, Kirk heads to the back of a small, light-blue shack — which houses blocks of baled cardboard, bins teeming with green waste, a grease oil reclamation vessel to make biofuel — to the herb and vegetable garden that he set up two and a half years ago.

The garden yields produce used in the hotel’s restaurants. Kirk pays for some of its soil and fertilizer with money gained from Hawaii’s HI-5 recycling program. Worms contained in the garden’s vermicomposting station supply the rest.

Where Do Hawaii Hotels Stand?

Understanding how Hawaii’s hospitality industry stacks up against that on the mainland is difficult because the information isn’t assembled into one place.

Neither the Hawaii Hotel & Lodging Association nor the Hawaii Visitors & Convention Bureau tracks hotels’ sustainability programs. Spokespeople for both organizations suggested that Civil Beat consult each hotel directly to learn about its initiatives.

So we looked at hotels that have been certified as “Green Businesses” by the state. Hawaii — through a partnership between the Departments of Health and Business, Economic Development and Tourism and the Chamber of Commerce — each year awards certifications to hotels, among other businesses, that demonstrate a commitment to resource conservation.

Tourism is the state’s primary source of income, and visitors have more than 350 hotels across the state to choose from. Twenty-eight hotels have won Hawaii Green Business awards throughout the years, but just six of them received awards this year: the Kahala, the Holiday Inn Waikiki Beachcomber, the Hyatt Regency Waikiki, the Marriott Maui Ocean Club, the Ritz-Carlton Kapalua and the Kilauea Lakeside Estate.

These hotels have adopted sustainability measures ranging from using recycled glass planters to installing computerized moisture sensing devices.

But how do their initiatives compare to those taking place in mainland hotels?

Mainland Hotels: Solid Waste Reduction

Some hotels, such as Greensboro, N.C.’s Proximity Hotel, now rely on solar and geothermal energy to power their buildings.

Others, like San Francisco’s Orchard Garden Hotel, only use 100-percent-recycled paper products and soy-based inks.

St. Yountville, Calif.’s Bardessono Hotel recycled more than 93 percent of the construction waste generated while it was being built.

These are just a few examples among a laundry list of increasingly innovative sustainability and waste-reduction initiatives that mainland hotels have incorporated into their business models.

The Kahala last year diverted about 115 tons of recyclable waste — the equivalent of nearly three humpback whales — that would have ended up in the garbage, according to Ellen Peralta Mansfield, the hotel’s chief engineer. That was about 19 percent of the total solid waste generated by the hotel.

Some of that recyclable waste consists of mixed plastic and paper materials — the stuff Kirk and his staff sort. They manually separate all these materials to accommodate state recycling guidelines.

“It’s petty cash, but we do derive some savings,” said Kirk, gesturing toward his garden. “It’s all a big cycle.”

He then points to the enclosed black receptacle at the back. Inside are thousands of worms composting organic waste, in turn producing nutrient-rich fertilizer.

The Kahala also gives most of its wet food waste to pig farmers. The farmers, GB Farms, pick up the food (sans the fruit rinds that the pigs won’t eat) from the hotel everyday and boil it up into food for their pigs.

“It was a very fortuitous opportunity,” said Kirk in reference to the Kahala’s two-year-old partnership with the farm. “It’s very cost-effective.”

But the Kahala isn’t the only hotel in Hawaii to set aside its food waste for pig farmers.

So do Turtle Bay Resort and Kauai’s Grand Hyatt, to name a few.

“Our chefs identified a couple of different pig farmers, and the key was that they had to come everyday, that we couldn’t have food waste sitting around,” said Diann Hartman, a Grand Hyatt spokesperson. “It was free food for them, and we kept a bunch of waste from going straight to the landfill. It’s a win-win situation.”

Shampoos and Soaps: “A Low-Hanging Fruit”

For Hawaii hotels, however, leftover amenities are largely absent from the recycling equation.

Some hotels recycle complimentary room amenities through programs such as Clean the World. Hotels donate leftover toiletries to the organizations, which then steam and disinfect the items and ships them to developing countries to fight hygiene-related illnesses.

It’s unclear if many Hawaii hotels do the same.

“That’s a sore spot, a low-hanging fruit,” said the Hyatt’s Hartman, noting that the hotel is experimenting with bulk containers, instead of single-use bottles, in some of its rooms.

One room amenity that the Kahala does divert from the landfill is toilet paper — by furnishing employees’ locker rooms with the hundreds of leftover rolls.

“We have an endless supply of toilet paper,” laughed hotel engineer Peralta Mansfield.

The Kahala also has plans to implement a materials recovery facility (MRF) stream this year, according to Kirk. The MRF stream would allow the hotel to identify and recuperate recyclable items from guests’ rooms, which Kirk estimates could make up as much as half of the total waste generated in these rooms.

“We pay $92 per ton [of waste] in tippage,” he said. “If we can delete even one-tenth of a ton, we’ll have some savings.”

Sustainable Energy: Cooking Oil & Seawater

A handful of Hawaii hotels, the Kahala included, collect their waste grease cooking oil and prepare it for conversion into biofuel. At the Kahala staff every night transfer the leftover oil from their kitchen friers into a reclamation vessel that filters out what’s useable. The converted oil is collected on a will-call basis.

Around the corner from the Kahala’s oil vessel, rising out of a patch of gravel, is a colossal blue pipe. Running through this apparatus is the seawater that cools the hotel.

The hotel pumps the salt water up through deep wells and then circulates it through two 360-ton chillers, therein providing air conditioning throughout the buildings. Once warmed, that seawater is released through the waterfall, into the dolphins’ pool and back into the ocean.

This mechanism saves the Kahala an estimated $36,000 each year in electrical costs, according to Peralta Mansfield. It also reduces the carbon dioxide released annually by more than 328,000 pounds.

The hotel’s AC system is very similar to that which is being adopted in downtown Honolulu. But whereas the Honolulu project is just being implemented now, the Kahala has depended on that technology since its construction in 1962. (The hotel opened for business in 1964.)

“The hotel really was ahead of its time,” said Peralta Mansfield. “Sustainability is contingent on the power of creative thinking.”