[CPEO-BIF] Kekaha, Hawai'i Abandoned Sugar Mill

[Lenny Siegel <Lsiegel@cpeo.org>]

Kauaʻi
What Toxic Legacy Did This Abandoned Sugar Mill Leave Behind?
The owner of the land tied to a former sugar mill wants to develop housing on the site but must make sure hazardous plantation-era remnants are cleared.

By Brittany Lyte 
Honolulu Civil Beat (HI)
October 24, 2025

On Kauaʻi, the old Kekaha sugar mill, vacant for decades, is surrounded on three sides by homes.

The smoke stack, a landmark for hunters in the mountains and fishermen at sea, remains a point of pride for the rural community. But the 20-acre property has been all but abandoned for 25 years, long enough that some residents whose land borders the mill have extended their backyard gardens past the overgrown boundary. Others have used the old mill lot as an illegal dumping ground for broken appliances and burned-out vehicles. 

“It’s just sitting there rotting,” Kekaha resident Bruce Pleas said. “It would be nice if someone did something with it. It’s in the middle of the neighborhood. But since the mill went down, I always said, and I still am convinced, it was utterly polluted.”

Aloun Farms, a Central Oʻahu-based vegetable producer that has been expanding on Kauaʻi, wants to do something with it. In 2023, it purchased 10 acres from the owner of the old Kekaha mill, Kekaha MS LLC, for nearly $2 million, with plans to build roughly two dozen single-family homes and two dozen two- or three- story apartments.


…

For the entire article, see
https://www.civilbeat.org/?p=1741007&utm

—

Lenny Siegel
Executive Director
Center for Public Environmental Oversight
A project of the Pacific Studies Center
LSiegel@cpeo.org
P.O. Box 998, Mountain View, CA 94042
Voice/Fax: 650-961-8918
http://www.cpeo.org
Author: DISTURBING THE WAR: The Inside Story of the Movement to Get Stanford University out of Southeast Asia - 1965–1975 (See http://a3mreunion.org)




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