According to Mike Dworsky, Hawai`i County’s director of solid waste, on an average day, the West Hawai`i landfill at Pu`uanahulu takes in from 380 to 400 tons of refuse. For each ton delivered, haulers pay a tipping fee of $85. Waste Management, Inc., which operates the landfill for the county, receives between $38 and $40 of that, depending on total volume. The county takes in the rest.
Unless there’s a huge growth in waste between now and the time BioEnergy Hawai`i starts operating its plant proposed at Keahole, the amount of rubbish delivered to Pu`uanahulu will plummet dramatically – as will, of course, the county’s revenue and WMI’s profits. To generate 6 megawatts of electricity, as called for in its plans, BEH will probably need more than 300 tons of trash a day, an amount that approaches the total volume of trash now generated by West Hawai`i residents, visitors, and businesses. Guy Kaniho, operations manager for Pacific Waste, has said that at present the company hauls about 90 tons of trash a day to the landfill.
According to Dworsky, firms that have long-term trash-haul contracts with Pacific Waste have been discouraged by the company from recycling. “Pacific Waste doesn’t recycle anything,” he said. “And people under contract to them can’t recycle, either,” being forced to pay more for trash pickups if the volume they put out is reduced, he said.
Dworsky said Pacific Waste principal Kosti Shirvanian had approached the county a couple of years ago with a proposal to develop, at no cost to the county, a trash incinerator of any type that the county wanted. The corporation counsel’s office rejected the idea, Dworsky said, as conflicting with state procurement regulations. When the county later issued a request for proposals from companies interested in developing a waste-to-energy plant, Shirvanian did not respond.
(The county eventually selected Wheelabrator, a subsidiary of Waste Management, to develop the facility, but in May, the County Council refused to give the project the go-ahead. The county is now scrambling to come up with a plan to deal with East Hawai`i waste, including expansion of the Hilo landfill, on life support – regulatorily speaking – for the last decade and a half.)
Written questions concerning the current and projected operations of Pacific Waste were posed to Guy Kaniho, manager of Pacific Waste. He had not responded by press time.
— Patricia Tummons
Volume 19, Number 1 July 2008
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