If Mike Nichols were remaking The Graduate, it’s a good chance Mr. McGuire’s advice to Ben Braddock would be altered to reflect the changing times. Here’s how their dialogue might go today:
“I just want to say one word to you – just one word,” Mr. McGuire says as he takes aside young Ben.
“Yes sir?”
“Are you listening?”
“Yes, I am.”
“Trash…. There’s a great future in trash. Think about it. Will you think about it?”
In the 1960s, plastics were quickly replacing all manner of items that had, until then, been made of natural fibers, metal, or wood. Half a century later, with disposable plastic items ubiquitous and practically unavoidable, the result is visible everywhere you turn in Hawai`i: landfills that rise from flat landscapes as though created by ancient mound-building societies; roadsides littered with every imaginable sort of plastic rubbish; closets, garages and, increasingly, commercial storage lockers packed to the rafters with cheaply made but durable goods.
Statistics tell the story. In 1960, the total volume of trash generated in the United States was 88 million tons, or 2.68 pounds per person per day for each man, woman, and child. Almost all of that went to landfills, with just over 6 percent being recycled and none of the waste being incinerated in waste-to-energy plants, such as Honolulu’s H-POWER.
By 2005, 296,410 million Americans generated a total of 245.7 million tons of trash, or 4.5 pounds per person per day, according to figures published by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Recycling rates, however, had increased over the last 45 years, so that the per-capita rate of trash landfilled – 2.46 pounds per person per day – was slightly lower than it was in 1960. (Because the population had grown by 64 percent, the annual volume of trash discarded into landfills increased almost proportionally, from 82.5 million tons in 1960 to 133.3 tons in 2005, or 61 percent.)
Hawai`i bucks this trend. In 1990, when the resident population was approximately 1.1 million, the total amount of waste generated came to 1.243 million tons. That averages out to 6.2 pounds per capita per day of waste, right in line with the overall national rate of waste generation. Honolulu had a pilot curbside recycling program and reported recycling about 10 percent of its waste, or roughly 80,000 tons. Recycling in the other counties was sporadic. In other words, roughly 94 percent of waste that was generated went to landfills. Nationally, however, by 1990, recycling and other waste diversion activities were reducing per-capita waste generation rates by more than 16 percent.
Fifteen years later, Hawai`i was generating 80 percent more waste – 2.227 million tons annually – even though the state’s population had grown by just 14 percent, to 1.275 million. On a per-capita basis, that translates to 9.6 pounds of waste per day. The fraction that ended up in landfills had declined, thanks in large part to H-POWER coming on line. Still, in 2005, 6.1 pounds was landfilled for each person in Hawai`i every day.
And the picture is not getting any brighter. Although the amount of waste landfilled in Hawai`i has fluctuated over the past 15 or so years, it has been steadily increasing since 2000. This raises the question: How long can these landfills last?
This month, Environment Hawai`i takes a quick look at the solid waste challenges facing the Big Island and Kaua`i. In July, we will turn our focus to Maui and O`ahu.
* * *
Trash Pile Steepens
At Aging Hilo Landfill
Life is slow in Hilo, a feature that some find attractive and others find maddening. But when it comes to Hilo’s landfill, time seems to be standing still.
The landfill, the only legal solid waste repository in the eastern half of the Big Island, was put into use in the early 1970s, years before the federal Environmental Protection Agency devised rules for siting and building such facilities. Present EPA regulations require new landfills to be lined and to have systems for collecting and treating the liquid that leaches through them. With Hilo receiving more than 10 feet a year of rainfall, the costs of managing leachate from any new landfill in the Hilo area have generally been regarded as prohibitive.
A state-of-the-art landfill was built in the mid-1990s on the dry side of the Big Island, near the Waikoloa resort. It is large enough to accommodate solid waste from both sides of the island for four decades or more. Yet, as the Hilo landfill approaches the end of its usable life, opposition to trucking solid waste across the island has been so strong, especially from owners of nearby resorts and companies serving their guests, that the trucking option has fallen out of political favor.
For more than a decade, county officials have been issuing warnings that the end is nigh for the Hilo landfill. Throughout the 1990s, Hawai`i County struggled to get the state Department of Health to agree to keep moving back the date by which the landfill was to cease operation – from 1993 to 1994, to 1996, to 1999.
The first decade of the 21st century has seen more of the same, with deadlines for closure coming and going with no perceptible impact on the daily operations of the South Hilo Sanitary Landfill. If anything, landfill operations are busier than ever before in the facility’s history, receiving upwards of 200 tons per day of solid waste.
Going Up
In June 2005, Laurence Lau, deputy state director for environmental health, reminded the county that its permit to operate the landfill expired March 1, 1996, and that the county had been operating on the basis of an administrative extension to the permit since then. However, Lau wrote, in light of the lack of progress in moving forward with other components of its solid waste management plan, “It appears as though DOH [the state Department of Health] and the county have no other choice but to re-enter the permitting process with the intent of establishing a definitive expiration date that will coincide with the expected date the facility reaches capacity, which is currently March 2006.”
Barely four months before that deadline arrived, the county Department of Environmental Management submitted to the state a plan to reshape the landfill through “sliver fill” construction, a process that would make its side slopes steeper and raise the elevation of its summit to about 260 feet above mean sea level, 64 feet higher than what is allowed under its current permit. The environmental assessment for the change said this would extend the landfill’s life by adding up to 1.3 million cubic yards to its capacity – accommodating the refuse that East Hawai`i generates for another two to four years. At the same time, the county formally applied for a modification of its administratively extended permit to operate the landfill in keeping with the planned changes.
The Department of Health warned the county that should the “sliver fill activity exceed the permitted design grades, the county may be subject to enforcement action and penalties. In addition, any construction outside DOH approval may require future corrective action pending our regulatory review.” At the same time, the DOH deemed the county’s permit modification application to be incomplete and sought additional information.
By April 2006, the landfill had reached the maximum height permitted under its existing permit. The county had already begun to rebuild the landfill slopes, pending action by the DOH on the permit modification request. The DOH, for its part, continued to seek information on how the county’s plan might affect the landfill’s stability.
More than a year after the county requested the permit modification, the state DOH continued to ask for more information. In a letter dated January 26, 2007, Thomas Arizumi, chief of the DOH Environmental Management Division, informed the county that “the analyses of the South Hilo Sanitary Landfill remain incomplete.” Among other things, Arizumi noted that the analyses assumed a shallower slope (2 ½ feet horizontal to 1 foot vertical) than the design contained in the permit application (2:1) and that the seismic impact studies lacked sufficient detail. In addition, Arizumi wrote, with respect to monitoring potential damage from earthquakes, visual observation may not be sufficient. “In light of the two recent … earthquakes on October 15, 2006, … it is not particularly comforting that the magnitude and extent of movement at the SHSL is unknown during these recent earthquakes and their aftershocks.”
By mid-May, the state had yet to grant the permit modifications Hawai`i County was seeking. Gary Siu, an engineer with the DOH Solid and Hazardous Waste Branch, said that the county’s analysis was “very simplistic” and not appropriate for a Zone 1 seismic hazard area such as Hilo. “If people are on the landfill when an earthquake occurs,” he said, “it could be catastrophic.”
As the county awaits a decision, it is exploring other options, including “bale-and-barge” operations (shipping trash to a landfill on the U.S. mainland or to Asia where it would be recycled), a waste-to-energy facility near Hilo, and even building a new landfill in Hilo (recently proposed by Councilmember Dominic Yagong). According to Mike Dworsky, the county’s solid waste manager, proposals for a WTE plant were opened last month and are under review. No decision is expected until July, he said.
Kaua`i Plan
Includes Incinerator
On Kaua`i, the looming closure of the Kekaha landfill is being greeted in much the same way that Hawai`i County approached that of its Hilo landfill. In a draft integrated solid waste management plan released in March, Kaua`i announced that it “is currently applying for a northwest horizontal expansion” of the Phase II area of the landfill.
Such an expansion, combined with the volume added through the vertical reshaping of the fill that is already occurring, could add up to five years to the landfill’s usable life. At present, the estimated closure date is December 2008. With the added airspace, the landfill could see service into 2013.
But despite the statement in the plan, the county has yet to apply to the Department of Health for the expansion. Troy Tanigawa, head of the Public Works Department’s solid waste branch, told Environment Hawai`i, “we have consultants working on the application.”
Over and above the landfill expansion, the plan calls for a new landfill to be built as well as a waste-to-energy facility. At present, the county landfill takes in somewhere between 90,000 and 101,000 tons per year, depending on whose figures are being used. (The DOH cites the lower figure in its report to the Legislature for fiscal 2006; the county uses the latter in its waste management plan.) On a daily basis, that translates to between 246 tons and 276 tons.
Under projections in the draft plan, prepared by consultant R.W. Beck, by 2011, the county will be needing to dispose of 115,430 tons. By then, however, the plan anticipates a waste-to-energy facility would be operational, so that the county would need to landfill only the non-combustible fraction of waste along with the ash, with the total amounting to between 14,000 and 17,000 tons per year. In addition to the WTE plant, the county would need to build a new landfill to handle all non-combustible waste beyond 2012, when the existing Kekaha landfill will be at capacity.
The waste-to-energy plant would require hefty increases in the amount of revenues generated by the solid waste branch of the Kaua`i County Public Works Department. Already, the county has begun to discuss raising the tipping fees, to $80 a ton from the present $56; according to the consultant, tipping fees could rise to as much as $141 per ton should a waste-to-energy plant be built. Total cost to the county to design and build the plant, according to the Beck report, could run as high as $113 million. Operational costs would run $8 million to $12 million a year.
The WTE plant outlined in the county’s draft plan would have a 14 megawatt turbine and be fueled by two 225-ton-per-day incinerators. (If the incinerators were sized up 10 percent, to 250-TPD, they would be subject to more stringent controls under Environmental Protection Agency regulations.)
Last year, the Kaua`i Island Utility Cooperative announced it had selected Barlow Projects, Inc., to built a waste-to-energy plant as part of a push toward “renewable” energy sources. According to a KIUC press release, the plant would be sized to generate 5.3 megawatts of power and “will reduce the volume of solid waste going to the landfill by 90 percent.”
Tanigawa says the county hasn’t worked with KIUC in coordinating plans for a WTE facility. The R.W. Beck document is a draft, he noted, “and it still has to be adopted” before any concrete steps are taken to implement any part of it.
— Patricia Tummons
Volume 17, Number 12 June 2007
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