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Kokua Line
June Watanabe
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Elephant Snot wipes out graffiti
Question: Our neighborhood has been "tagged" in a number of locations, including some lava rock walls. Are there any tips for removing dried paint from those rough surfaces?
Answer: It sounds ghastly, but Elephant Snot is said to do the job.
We posed your question to Mimi Gans of the volunteer group TAG (Totally Against Graffiti), which periodically holds paint-outs to get rid of graffiti in the McCully-Moiliili neighborhood, and she checked with Ron Lockwood, chairman of the McCully-Moiliili Neighborhood Board ("Kokua Line," May 10, 2007).
Lockwood said Elephant Snot works not only on rock walls, but also on metal and concrete.
"It is the best graffiti remover for porous surfaces out there in the market today," proclaims distributor Ric Ramos, of Graffiti Solutions Hawaii in Pearl City.
He described the product -- one of six he distributes from a company in Minnesota -- as a "jellylike" substance used to remove graffiti markings on porous substances such as rocks, hollow tile walls and lava rock walls.
After applying it, you let it "sit" for several minutes, then wash it off.
"The longer you let the Snot sit, the better," Ramos said. "The graffiti regularly comes right off."
Ramos has been distributing the product, which is 100 percent biodegradable, for 18 months.
He started his business "because no one else was doing anything about graffiti other than just painting it (over). ... I know for a fact that painting different colored squares along our freeway was not an answer to this problem. In fact, painting squares is called 'framing' for the next tagger to leave their mark."
One of his other products is meant to take off the "tags" from street and highway signs.
Graffiti Solutions Hawaii also offers to remove graffiti.
"This is where we see most of our growth in our company," Ramos said. "We are called almost daily to do removals for our regular customers or by new customers."
His list of customers includes Castle & Cooke Homes Hawaii, the Department of Education, the University of Hawaii at Manoa and Hilo, Dick Pacific Construction, Colliers Monroe Friedlander, County of Hawaii, Certified Management and TAAG (Taking Action Against Graffiti, in Waikele).
Ramos can be contacted at 478-5060 or by e-mail at ramosR022@hawaii.rr.com.
Auwe
To the men who, at about 3 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 23, were clearing a Liholiho Street vacant lot next to an apartment building.
I noticed a supermarket shopping cart in the lot. Later, I saw that the cart had been moved across the street to an area where the residents of another apartment building place their bulky items to be picked up. If you considered the cart trash, why couldn't you have left it to be picked up where you were working? Please have some class and don't dump your trash on someone else's property. -- Anonymous
Got a question or complaint? Call 529-4773, fax 529-4750, or write to Kokua Line, Honolulu Star-Bulletin, 500 Ala Moana Blvd., No. 7-210, Honolulu 96813. As many as possible will be answered. E-mail to
kokualine@starbulletin.com.
See also: Useful phone numbers