How solid are the state’s statistics on solid waste?
That question arose as Environment Hawai`i began research for the articles that appear elsewhere in this issue.
Consider this example from Maui. In a recent report from a consultant hired to prepare an updated solid waste management plan, figures are given that put the waste received by the Maui Central landfill at 124,356 tons in fiscal 2005. The state puts the actual tonnage at 157,817, a difference of more than 25 percent. Information provided by the county is cited as the source for both figures.
Lene Ichinotsubo, chief of the DOH Solid and Hazardous Waste Branch, says the state relies on the counties to provide accurate information. Since the counties have to pay the state 35 cents for each ton reported, she said, they would have an incentive to give the state lower numbers than higher ones. Also, she said, many of the counties do not weigh residential solid waste and so the figures they report to the state may reflect only that waste brought in by commercial haulers. She could offer no explanation why counties would report higher tonnage to the state than what they actually received.
Discrepancies abound in reports from other counties as well.
Hawai`i County informed the DOH that its Pu`uanahulu landfill received 87,331.26 tons in 2000. In an environmental impact statement prepared in 2003 by the county, it reported 92,688 taken in at Pu`uanahulu for the same year, a difference of 7 percent. Figures for the South Hilo landfill were 66,060 tons versus 69,923 tons during the same period. These differences may not be huge, but the question arises: why should there be any difference at all?
Nor does the Department of Health itself seem able to keep the numbers straight. In its 1998-1999 Waste Disposal and Diversion Survey, it reported Waimanalo Gulch on O`ahu took in 248,004 tons of refuse in 1999; in the DOH Integrated Solid Waste Management Plan published a year later, the figure for Waimanalo Gulch was 310,000 tons. The waste disposal survey reported H-POWER, Honolulu’s waste-to-energy plant, processed 597,947 tons of refuse in FY 1999; the solid waste plan reported the facility took in 638,000 tons in the same period.
The discrepancy in the numbers is a problem not just for the state alone, which may not be getting full payment from the counties for each ton of trash taken in. It is also one for planners, who use past numbers to project future trends, the counties themselves, which must assume ultimate responsibility for managing solid waste, and residents, who inevitably pay the cost.
State law requires each county to adopt an integrated solid waste management plan that demonstrates the county’s ability to deal with the volume of solid waste projected to be generated as well as its programs for reducing the amount of solid waste generated in the first place.
Those plans have been anything but prescient in their forecasts.
Maui County had expected Phase IV-A of its Central Maui landfill, opened in 2005, to have accommodated more than two years’ worth of refuse, hauled in at a rate of 400 tons per day. Actual amounts of rubbish hauled to the facility have averaged between 600 and 650 tons per day, or an increase of up to 63 percent over expectations.
In 2003, Hawai`i County prepared an environmental impact statement for a sort facility that projected its Pu`uanahulu landfill would receive 99,295 tons of waste in fiscal 2004. The actual figure, according to the state, was 126,453 tons. There’s more than a 25 percent gap between the two numbers. A similar discrepancy exists for the amount of waste dumped into the East Hawai`i landfill. While the consultants projected the landfill would receive 74,382 tons in 2005, the actual volume was 83,138.
— Patricia Tummons
Volume 17, Number 12 June 2007
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