Curbside Recycling Makes a Comeback in Kailua
It’s 8 o’clock on a sunny Wednesday morning in Kailua, and I’m sitting on a bench outside Kalapawai Market – a historic green-and-white, Mom-‘n’-Pop store fronting the beach park. Half of Kailua congregates here for coffee, conversation, and the paper as early light expands behind Lanikai Point. Further down the bench from me, a girl in shorts and tank top is hugging her roommate goodbye.
“Oh, wait,” she exclaims. “Will you do me a favor and put out the recycling bins when you get home? Today is pickup.”
Five minutes later, a youngish man with green eyes and close-cropped hair walks up.
“Are you Catherine?” he asks.
Wearing an orange T-shirt that reads “O`ahu Community Recycling” with the universally recognized triangle of arrows on it, Mark Benghiat is about to start his rounds. I’ve asked to tag along this morning so I can get a feel for this fledgling curbside recycling program that’s spreading like wildfire cross my hometown. After climbing into a beige Chevy truck with OCR’s logo emblazoned on the sides, we’re off.
Though a friend sometimes accompanies him, Mark usually drives alone through the neighborhoods of Kailua. This happens to be the first week of a new schedule in which pickups will be divided between Wednesdays and the new Thursday route for outlying areas such as Enchanted Lake, Maunawili, and Olomana. “We needed to add another day because it was getting to be too much for just one,” he explains. When he and his friend covered all the neighborhoods the previous Wednesday, they didn’t finish until after four in the afternoon and then had to make seven drop-off trips to the school recycling centers.
We pull into a shady driveway near the beach and Mark jumps out, disappearing into a garage. A moment later he emerges with a green plastic bin filled with aluminum cans and glass bottles, which he empties with a noisy clatter into one of a dozen large containers in the truck bed. He does the same with a yellow bin full of paper.
Someone looks out of a window and waves. Mark waves back. “They’re one of our first customers, so I can go in and get the stuff if it’s not on the curb.”
How many houses do you serve? I ask. “We’re up to a hundred and sixty four right now” – he turns to grin at me – “and growing fast. We’re adding an average of 10 new homes a week and we’d like to get up to a thousand within the year. If things keep going at the same pace, I don’t think it’ll be that hard.”
O`ahu Community Recycling is a four-man company founded two years ago by a young teacher/surfer named Bryce Sprecher. Originally from Colorado, his manner is easygoing, open and considerate. “I’ve always known that Hawai`i is ten years behind the times,” he says. “A few years ago, I did some brainstorming about what I wanted to do with my life. Because I love kids, and I also love surfing, the beach, and Hawai`i’s environment, I started asking myself, ‘how can I give back to the kids and the environment?’ A recycling project just made perfect sense.”
Starting alone and with just four subscribers in Lanikai, he took it easy in the early months of 1999, “to make sure everything was running smooth.” Eventually, he began visiting elementary schools, attending PTA and Neighborhood Board meetings to explain the program. All of OCR’s colleciosn are deposited at the white Recycle Hawai`i containers in elementary school parking lots. Any profits from these go to the schools in the form of a check from Honolulu Recovery Systems, the private company contracted by the City and County to sort and ship materials to recycling plants on the Mainland and in Asia.
To visitors from the mainland, Hawai`i’s lack of a curbside recycling program is surprising at best, and downright appalling at worst. For an isolated island state with a fragile natural environment and limited waste disposal capacity, one would think we would be at the forefront of recycling and remediation initiatives, not the tail end. There is no other state in the country without at least one curbside recycling program. New York has nearly 1,500. Another small state, Connecticut, has 169. Like Hawai`i, its landfills have reached full capacity.
The small Canadian province of Nova Scotia successfully completed a five-year campaign to divert half its waste from landfills and incineration. This included collecting organic waste and recyclables from every household and the banning of a range of valuable materials from landfills. Three thousand jobs were created through the program, and though the incinerator is still in operation, it will not be replaced at the end of its lifetime.
If these areas can do it, why can’t we?
In 1990, the City and county of Honolulu launched a pilot recycling program in select windward communities. A private hauler made weekly pickups of newspapers, plastics, gklass, and aluminum in bins, plastic fiber bags, or grocery bags. A year later the program was abandoned, ostensibly because of low participation rates and high costs. In a 1996 letter to the New York Times, the city’s recycling coordinator, Suzanne Jones, wrote, “We do not have a costly curbside collection program; nor do we push recycling where it doesn’t make good economic sense. There’s no crisis. Just smart planning.” Instead, the city chose to focus on recycling in the commercial sector and left residents to deliver recyclables on their own to the schools.
Among critics, the city’s assumptions about curbside economics are based on elaborate cost projections and inefficient operating procedures. But perhaps the real motivation for a successful program should begin at the grassroots level, through community-based efforts like OCR (which, incidentally, has won Jones’ approval and is now posted on the city’s recycling website). It is people like Bryce and Mark who have the energy to seek out new customers, educate students and parents, and promote a genuine commitment to their environment without getting hungup on bureaucracy or the bottom line.
“This thing isn’t about money,” Bryce tells me over coffee. “When things are tight, that just forces us to get creative – for example, targeting small businesses like Kalapawai or Down to Earth. It constantly fuels your fire. I don’t think recycling should be forced on people, but the more they’re educated, the more they start coming to us. That’s the best thing about this – we don’t have to do battle, we can just let this evolve.”
He pauses thoughtfully. “You know, it really feels like planting a tree and watching it grow.”
Catherine Black lives in Kailua, O`ahu. This is her first column for Environment Hawai`i.
Volume 11, Number 8 February 2001