In July of 1990, the small windward community of Lanikai, O’ahu, bade farewell to its homegrown recycling program and welcomed the offer of the City and County of Honolulu to take over with once-a-week curbside pickup. The Lanikai Association had seen its third-Saturday collection expand to the point where monthly sales of recyclables were bringing in (after expenses) about $500, which the association used for park improvements, refuse cans along paths to the beach, and other amenities. People from outside Lanikai were participating, bringing not only aluminum cans, glass and old newspapers, but also plastics, magazines, and color-sorted office paper.
Eighteen months later, the city pulled out. Lanikai residents wanting to recycle must now haul their goods to centers several miles distant. A lot of them do not bother.
Is there a Pattern?
In 1989, workers in Honolulu Hale, the Municipal Building, the Board of Water Supply and the city Prosecutor Attorney’s Office undertook their own office recycling program. As described in the Refuse Division’s report on recycling to the City Council, this was begun “with minimal assistance from the Department of Public Works.”
This was not good enough for the Department of Public Works, which criticized the “inefficient collection system.” So, “the end of November 1990, the city implemented a state-of-the-art desktop recycling system… The Prosecuting Attorney’s Office decided not to participate for reasons of confidentiality, and terminated their prior recycling activity.”
The city’s program gives employees “special desktop folders” with “a tabbed divider designed to keep the white paper and colored paper/newspaper separate. When the folder is full, papers are deposited in central collection containers (manufactured with 15 percent recycled plastic).” Employees – including the same people who had been recycling on their own initiative – were exposed to slide shows and question-and-answer sessions. Posters listing “Do’s and Don’t’s” of recycling were prominently displayed. Recycling containers were placed in public areas as well. As the report notes, “the containers are made, in part, of 100 percent recycled plastic lumber.”
The volunteer program, in 15 months, recovered 129 tons of recyclables (almost entirely high-grade office paper), bringing in revenue of $23,761. The recyclable paper was sold, in other words, for $184 a ton – a premium rate. There was no start-up cost, operation cost, or period of amortization for expensive equipment.
The city’s far more elaborate program in 10 months generated 119 tons of recyclables (office paper, but also glass, aluminum, newspaper, and plastic) for revenue totaling $6,148 (about $52 a ton). Apart from the lower value of the recyclables collected, the city also had start-up costs reported at $30,000,which it stated would require 34 months to amortize. At the end of the first 10 months of the city’s office recycling program, in other words, it was still almost $24,000 in the hole.
The Midas Touch
The two cases described here should be disturbing to anyone interested in seeing recycling become a viable economic activity. The notion that bells and whistles and special containers (even those made “in part of 100 percent recycled plastic lumber”) are in anyway related to a successful recycling program is plain silly. Worse, it is fueled by the mindset that the solution to life’s problems lies in buying new stuff the same blind consumerism that bears much of the blame for the problem of too much trash in the first place.
The city is proposing to give curbside recycling another try. The idea now is to give residents specially designed 96-gallon wheeled receptacles in which they would place their regular refuse most of the time, and which would be picked up by new mechanically loaded trucks. Once a month, however, people would place all their recyclable goods into the container. The same truck used in regular trash runs would now pick up the recyclable goods, which would be sorted later.
Apart from the expense of this approach ($70 a container, with the cost of the specialized trucks not yet provided by the city), it has the disadvantage that the recyclable goods set out for pickup stand a good chance of being contaminated – and hence, rendered useless – before they ever make it to a recycler. Glass that is broken cannot be used, especially when it has not been color sorted beforehand. Setting out recyclables in the same bins used for household refuse could soil paper. Even if contamination were not a problem, this approach requires someone, somewhere to unscramble the commingled recyclable materials, and the cost of that labor substantially reduces the revenue generated by the eventual sale of the recycled goods.
Looking at the city’s past and planned approaches to recycling, it would seem difficult to argue with the idea that they are designed more for show than for substance. Behind the smoke and mirrors – the logos, the bins, the tabbed folders, and the like – there is little more than the desire to appear to be engaging in an activity that nowadays ranks right up there with motherhood and apple pie. To confuse that desire with commitment would be wrong.
The strangeness of the city’s recycling program is perhaps nowhere as evident as it is in the case of the school trailers. The city touts the school-based collection centers as being valuable not only for the goods recovered, but also for the values instilled in the minds of the young participants. From the hard-nosed economic perspective, however (adopted by the city to suit its convenience), the program is folly. Schools might receive $20 a ton for recycled goods, if they’re lucky. The city reports that it pays on average $170 a ton to generate that $20 in revenue and on occasion, it has paid up to $811 a ton. Expensive lessons, indeed. School administrators, to say nothing of the students and their parents, have every right to ask that the city pay them for not recycling and hand over to the schools the money saved. Better yet, the city could pay the schools to start up their own recycling programs, with the schools keeping the difference between what the city now pays for an average ton of recycled goods and whatever the school ends up paying for the same recycled ton. That would be more than a lesson in recycling; it would be a powerful lesson in economic realities as well.
H-POWER’s Long Shadow
As our article on recycling points out, cities committed to incinerators or landfills usually are only half-hearted in their approach to recycling. The city thus encourages the recycling of a certain fraction of materials that H-POWER cannot easily digest (glass especially), but efforts to take burnable recyclable goods (paper, plastic, and yard waste) out of the soup are pursued listlessly, if at all.
The city denies that recycling competes with H-POWER, arguing instead that there is plenty of solid waste to go around. The city’s contract with H-POWER’s operators requires delivery of 561,600 tons a year of “acceptable” waste. According to the city’s report to the Council, the total waste generated on O’ahu in a year is almost double that amount (1,122,600 tons). “Approximately 116,640 tons are being recycled,” the city report states. “The remaining 444,360 tons give recycling much to work with.” Refuse continues to grow, the city reports, so “the recycling potential, then, will also continue to grow.”
Not necessarily. The H-POWER plant has room to accommodate a third boiler. It would not be far-fetched to imagine that the city, arguing that recycling is too expensive, will seek to expand H-POWER. With powerful lobbying interests (and large campaign contributors) seeking H-POWER’s expansion lined up against those few (and generally poor) groups lobbying for recycling, the outcome in the present, highly charged political situation is no contest at all: H-POWER would easily carry the day.
The July-August 1991 edition of WorldWatch magazine comments on the advantage enjoyed by the incinerator lobbyists: “Despite its many shortcomings and the growing opposition from political and environmental groups, incineration is far from dead. Many U.S. states have plans to spend large sums on incineration while devoting far less to waste reduction and recycling. The Department of Energy has proposed speeding the construction of incinerators as a source of energy and the incinerator industry is spending millions to attract new contracts. The most vocal supporters of local waste reduction and recycling programs, by contrast, are usually low-budget community groups.”
Wasteful Politics
Combustion Engineering and Amfac, the two partners in the joint venture that operates H-POWER, have contributed to the re-election campaign of Honolulu Mayor Frank Fasi. Other contractors and corporations have contributed, too including many, if not all, of those receiving contracts from the city. One contractor, unidentified, was quoted in Ian Lind’s newsletter, Hawai’i Monitor as saying, “as an architect who has been in practice in Hawai’i since 1958, I can assure you that there is a painful reality that I had to learn that if you want to be considered for public projects you have to be very generous at campaign time. (The architect’s comments are quoted more fully in the December 1991 edition of Hawai’i Monitor. For more information on corporate contributions to Fasi’s campaign, readers might consult the February 1992 edition of Hawai’i Monitor.)
But for an interest in obtaining a city contract, it is hard to imagine why people in Glen Head, New York, Wyomissing, Pennsylvania, West Hartford, Connecticut, Sterling, Virginia, Strongsville, Ohio, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Irvine, California, Orem, Utah, Point Reyes, California, Windsor, Connecticut and scores of other cities across the county would contribute heavily to Fasi. If Fasi indeed enjoys a national reputation for outstanding or exemplary governance – a reputation of the sort, say, that might inspire disinterested parties to pull out their checkbooks and exclaim, “By Jove, I’ll support that guy” – it has escaped our notice.
A jaded body politic in Honolulu has grown too accustomed to the outrageous tilt that campaign contributions on this scale appear to give to the normal and customary actions of government agencies. The quick movement of Sam Callejo, former head of the Public Works Department, from Fasi’s Cabinet to Fasi’s campaign (he’s now co-chairman) draws hardly a comment, much less a yowl.
Where to Now?
If there is a lesson to be drawn from the City’s host of recycling programs, it should be the vital role that community involvement and incentive play. Yes, markets for recycled goods are thin – which is all the more reason for recycled materials to be processed in a manner that delivers them to the recycler in uncontaminated, useful form. This requires labor more than machinery – and that labor is, in a properly motivated community, a free resource.
And there’s the rub. No contractor is going to get paid a sorting fee if the goods are sorted by the time they’re hauled away. No vendor is going to get rich off the sale of elaborate 96-gallon wheeled carts or the tracks to dump them into if the city opts for a low-cost, low-tech recycling program. Most of all, if the good folk of Honolulu insist that retailers cut down on packaging, if they themselves alter habits to reduce waste and recycle what is left over, if businesses and employees cooperate to sort and sell their office paper instead of paying to have it hauled away – if these things happen, no one will get rich at the public’s expense by installing a third burner at H-POWER.
Recycling can compete economically against H-POWER, especially if H-POWER is not allowed to operate until it can demonstrate that it complies with permitted emission levels more than half the time. To make recycling competitive, inventive uses for recycled goods are being developed, and more opportunities need to be found. The Recycling Association of Hawai’i, a private, non-profit organization, has had remarkable success developing recycling programs for schools and private businesses. And it has accomplished all this on the tightest of budgets with minimal state support.
In the next few months, all four counties should be holding public hearings on draft solid waste management plans. Readers wanting to learn more about the plans being developed for the county in which they live, or wanting to be notified of any hearings scheduled, may want to call their county’s Department of Public Works, Refuse or Solid Waste Division.
Et Cetera
This issue inaugurates a new column, a new type size, and a new format (12 pages). The “Island Watch” feature is designed to allow topical, more timely reporting on issues that fall outside the purview of the central problem addressed in the cover story and related articles of each issue. These changes are not without cost. We trust that readers will understand this and that some of you will respond appropriately.
On June 20, Common Cause/Hawai’i cited the editor of Environment Hawai’i and six other citizens for their Exemplary Public Service. We are honored to be in the company of those selected for this award: Representatives Virginia Isbell and Cynthia Thielen; Council Member Steve Holmes, Honolulu Weekly publisher Laurie Carlson; Loretta Schuler, an activist for health rights; and Barry Nakamura, the archaeologist for Bishop Museum fired for expressing his views on the significance of a site in Halawa Valley that stands in the path of H-3.
Volume 3, Number 1 July 1992