Longtime activist and astute social observer, Bart Dame, criticized the city’s recycling program in a Facebook post this week, arguing that it makes more sense to send paper and plastic to be burned by H-Power.
Here’s his post, which was accompanied by a link to a CBS News story on today’s recycling realities.
I have gently raised questions about Honolulu’s recycling programs for years and found it to be a taboo subject. I have concluded it is mostly an expensive and ineffective fraud. But nobody is willing to talk about it.
The exception appears to be aluminum, which gets done because it is cost effective.but paper, plastics and glass? It ain’t happening. For Oahu households, I recommend against sorting out paper and plastics. It is better to burn them in H-Power than to stockpile them or ship them to someplace over the horizon where THEY will burn them.
Your thought? Is the recycling program largely a charade at this point?
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H-Power already generates 2 tons of ash per day off about 6 million pounds of trash daily. That ash gets buried in our one-and-only landfill for residential and commercial trash — Waimanalo Gulch on the Waianae coast.
As you know, that landfill has had capacity concerns and closure promises broken many times. with no realistic alternative in sight. The city is looking at programs to reuse ash from H-Power, but outcomes and costs of those programs remain to be seen.
We need to do a better job of reducing, reusing and recycling our trash, especially at the individual level, where trash is generated.
Legislation for bypassing recycling to H-Power is in Council Committee already. The recycling market dried up long ago. Believe this will justify what has been going on for sometime. Whoops it went to H-Power…what the ASH? We also need a new dump for ash, sewer solids, and miscellaneous hurricane debris.
Looks like the City’s expensive charade is complete!
Generation of single use products/packaging for convenience, in concert with growing island population, is, of course, unsustainable. One of many areas of concern that are carrying on until………
Can we citizens of HNL ever hope to expect any level of competency and visionary leadership from the usual gang of recycled, lifetime, hollow worded politicians? Taxing their way out of problems of their own making is only going to accelerate the educated, youthful exodus to the mainland.
Therefore leaving us with even MORE recycled, lifetime losers.
I was told by a worker at one of our Maui recycling centers that if a bin is “contaminated” with items other than what it is designated for, the bin goes to land fill as they do not have the personnel to sort through it. I made a cursory examination of several of the bins and they all seemed to contain items not listed.
The city’s curbside recycling program was always just an unnecessary feel-good exercise and Jeremy Harris self-promotion vehicle that didn’t make sense, especially given its conflict with the state’s flawed bottle deposit scheme. The later drama over the landfill site was a cynical attempt to benefit resort developers and a private landfill scheme while undermining H-Power expansion and posing as saviors of a community that’s become addicted to victim narrative. Most people will never understand any of this and can’t be bothered to think it through. Recycling just sounds so much better, and media analysis is a joke.
It is really too bad that people think that recycling is not a good thing to do.
Reduce
Reuse
Recycle.
It is so very possible, yet who is putting out the money to get the equipment to do that?
For instance: different types of plastic can be washed and melted down to make solo type cups …..
and there are already companies that know how to melt and use (like injection molding) “virgin plastic” on the islands, yet have to incentive to do something better.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jun/17/recycled-plastic-america-global-crisis?
It’s like they really do want to be progressive, but they are uncomfortable with even small changes, so once a policy is in place, they cringe at the idea of change. And they prefer inferior, expensive corporate solutions.
https://www.civilbeat.org/2019/08/this-program-diverted-tons-of-trash-from-landfills-now-it-might-end/