Celebrating 300,000 Genki Balls with City proclaiming April 2026 “Genki Ball Month”
Over 150 students from Kamehameha Elementary School, Hawai‘i School for the Deaf & Blind, Pearl City Elementary School, and Leilehua High School joined the 2026 Earth Day celebration at the Diamond Head end of the Ala Wai Canal.
On Earth Day, an effort to clean up the Ala Wai Canal celebrated two meaningful milestones. The Genki Ala Wai Project reached 300,000 Genki Balls, and the City and County of Honolulu proclaimed April 2026 as “Genki Ball Month.” This bioremediation initiative involves Genki Balls—mud balls containing billions of Effective Microorganisms® (EM)—that are tossed into the state’s most polluted waterway where they sink to the bottom of the canal to help break down the sludge.
Over 150 students from Kamehameha Elementary School, Hawai‘i School for the Deaf & Blind, Pearl City Elementary School, and Leilehua High School joined the Earth Day celebration at the Diamond Head end of the Ala Wai Canal.
The proclamation, signed by Honolulu Mayor Rick Blangiardi and presented at the celebration, designated Genki Ball Month in “recognition of the many dedicated individuals and organizations collaborating on the Genki Ala Wai Project” and honored the “noble efforts to keep Honolulu’s waterways vibrant, safe and clean.
Seven years and 300,000 balls later
EM Technology has been successful in over a hundred countries worldwide over the past 30 years, inspiring Kenneth Kaneshiro, director of the Center for Conservation Research and Training at the Pacific Biosciences Research Center in SOEST, and others to initiate this effort in 2019. Kaneshiro and his team determined that deploying Genki Balls was an approach that could engage community members and begin to enhance the water quality in the Ala Wai Canal.
The project has truly been a community-based effort, with more than 100 schools and organizations and over 21,100 volunteers contributing over the past seven years. Students and community members helped make Genki Balls and tossed them into the canal, all while learning about the place where they live, work, and play.
Kumu Pualeilani Kamahoahoa, Hawaiian Cultural Practitioner, summarized the seven-year effort: “I remember in 2019 when we tossed the first Genki Balls from Hōkūleʻa behind the Convention Center. At the time, we wondered how we would ever reach 300,000 with no funding, no volunteers, no resources. And today, that day has come.”
Stewarding STEM students and environment
“What is most gratifying for me is to see how the kids can be influenced by the project and be inspired to go into STEM fields,” said Kaneshiro. “In one instance, a student from ‘Iolani School discovered a new species of bacteria which she named and described and published in a scientific journal. Another student built a drone using 3-D printing technologies to be able to collect water samples from the Ala Wai to bring back to the lab for analyses of water quality.”
The Genki Ala Wai Project is just one component of a systems thinking approach in addressing the environmental and land use issues through the Ala Wai Watershed Restoration and Revitalization Project.
“Our work has produced measurable results, including over 20 inches of sludge reduction at the Kapahulu end of the canal, improved water quality trends, and increased sightings of marine life including fish, sea turtles, eagle and manta rays, and native oysters,” said Kaneshiro. “Water quality compliance has also improved from 44% in 2020 to 75% in 2025, based on Surfrider Foundation’s Blue Water Task Force data. All of these observations attest to the success of the EM Technology in helping to clean up the once polluted waterway of the canal.”
Kaneshiro emphasized, “The Earth Day celebration was not just to commemorate a milestone, but also to highlight the power of working together to mālama our waterways.”