In 1995, the City and County of Honolulu recycled 149 tons of office paper. The amount it received from the recycler – $12,321 – wasn’t a lot, but when you consider that the city was able to avoid hauling and disposal costs, it came out ahead.
1995 was a highwater mark in the city’s efforts, from the standpoint of revenue and recycling. Since then, recycling of office paper has retreated into the cellar. According to the city’s Department of Environmental Services, in 1996, the city recycled even more office paper (155 tons), but received practically nothing. Recycling continued pretty much on a break-even basis over the next decade, with the quantity of paper recycled varying year to year: from the high of 155 tons in 1996 to a low of 64 tons in 2003. And over the second half of 2006, the city paid about $3,500 to have some 20 tons of office paper hauled away. The remainder of the city’s waste paper – more than 100 tons, to judge from figures from recent years – was presumably taken to H-POWER.
Office paper isn’t the only easily recycled commodity that is routinely taken to the city’s incinerator. The city commissioned a report from consultant R.W. Beck to look at the waste streams at H-POWER and Waimanalo Gulch, the nearby landfill that receives ash and residue from H-POWER as well as municipal solid waste when H-POWER is down (about two days a week, on average).
The report, released in April, found that the average waste stream consists of
- 30 percent paper;
- 25 percent organic waste (textiles, food, carpet, tires, animal waste, soap, vacuum cleaner bags, and other such items);
- 12 percent plastic;
- 9 percent green waste;
- 5 percent metal;
- 5 percent wood;
- 2 percent glass;
- 12 percent other waste.
A similar study done in 1999 found the percentage of paper was less (26 percent), as was that for plastics (8 percent) and organic waste (19 percent). The percentage of green waste was more than double (18 percent), while metal waste was slightly higher (6.5 percent). Perhaps the most remarkable difference between the waste generated in 1999 compared with that of 2006 was the overall volume: In 2006, the total estimated weight of waste landfilled or burned came to 940,187 tons. In 1999, it was 821,437 tons, or roughly 80 percent of the 2006 volume.
When analyzed by sector, the growth of residential waste is even more dramatic: from 316,491 tons in 1999 to 412,016 in 2006, an increase of 30 percent.
“The amount of household `opala is increasing ten times faster than population growth,” says Lydi Morgan, a member of the O`ahu Group Executive Committee of the Sierra Club, Hawai`i Chapter. The island’s population grew 3 percent in the same period, from 878,900 to 906,000.
To Jeff Mikulina, the executive director of the Sierra Club, Hawai`i Chapter, the most shocking aspect of the report is its finding that the city is burning beverage containers that could be redeemed for a nickel each. The R.W. Beck study estimated about 272 million deposit bottles and cans are landfilled or incinerated each year on O`ahu, with a redemption value of $13.6 million. “It is such a waste, over $37,000 each day,” Mikulina said. “A curbside recycling program would capture many of these deposit containers and could apply the nickels toward funding the curbside program.”
According to Mikulina, in 2005, a private recycler offered to pay the city if he could operate an islandwide curbside recycling program, with the container deposits left by residents in the curbside collection making the program profitable. The city rejected the offer, he said.
— Patricia Tummons
Volume 18, Number 1 — July 2007
Leave a Reply