The bad news from China took effect on New Year’s Day, 2018: Due to growth, development and a mounting pile of its own recyclable waste, the world’s second-largest economy was no longer in the market to buy America’s trash as raw materials.
Suddenly, U.S. cities — which had benefited from an easy way to make recycling pencil out, given that for decades, China had been happy to buy up 40-50 percent of the recyclable materials — now had to come up with other solutions.
While the islands face a particular problem given the added factor of shipping costs, Oahu is not alone: Philadelphia, for example, has begun sending half of its recyclables to the incinerator.
The alternative contemplated by the City and County of Honolulu is a variant of that, though in milder form. Noting the falling values of recyclable glass, aluminum and paper now being collected in the city’s curbside recycling program, the city auditor in 2017 proposed redirecting much of it.
The waste, recyclable or otherwise, could go to the garbage-to-energy plant, H-POWER, to reduce the volume of what otherwise is bound for the landfill, according to the audit. The numbers are hard to dispute. From a high in 2011 when the sales value of the collected materials topped $2.5 million annually, it has dropped by more than half — and continues to fall.
WHAT’S SUPPOSED TO BE IN THE BINS?
>> Green bins contain the green waste. That’s largely yard clippings: grass and tree and hedge trimmings. But it also can include plain vegetable and fruit waste unmixed with other ingredients.
>> Blue bins contain the recyclables, which can all be mixed together. Paper products are limited to newspaper, corrugated cardboard and white or colored office paper. Paper should exclude glossy paper or inserts, clips, envelopes and sticky labels. Glass bottles and jars, aluminum cans, metal food cans and plastic containers of types 1 and 2 (look for the triangle with a 1 or 2 inside, usually embossed on the bottom of the container).
>> Gray bins contain the regular trash — everything else suitable for general disposal, excluding anything hazardous. These are items such as plastic bags, Styrofoam, junk mail, magazines, cereal boxes and other chipboard, food cans and plastic containers other than those coded No. 1 or No. 2.
Regardless, the notion of abandoning the curbside recycling effort quickly drew opposition from environmental groups, including the Sierra Club. Jodi Malinoski, policy advocate for the Hawaii chapter, said the organization does not want to see the city continually feeding its garbage to the plant, even if harvesting energy from it is a partial offset.
“It seems like we have to keep the fire going,” she said. “It’s time to cut that out.”
Rather than curbing the recycling, Malinoski said environmentalists favor finding a way to cut costs by reducing waste overall and by manufacturing a product with recyclable materials on-island rather than shipping it elsewhere.
There may be a point at which the city and the environmental groups can meet in the middle, said the city’s environmental services chief, and that discussion is likely to happen over the next several months.
Still, Lori Kahikina, director of the Department of Environmental Services, said she sees the logic of the city audit.
“If commodity prices are down and it makes more sense to send it to H-POWER, then we’d like to have more flexibility to do that, instead of shipping it somewhere else,” Kahikina said.
However, she added that she believes that there could be steps taken to improve the financial outlook for recycling, starting with on-island plant for converting glass to sand and other products.
The city is in the final stages of consulting with community groups and others in the update of its Integrated Solid Waste Management Plan, a process that happens every 10 years. A draft has been completed and is under review by an advisory committee before it will be published in March or April, she said.
WHO GETS IT, AND WHERE DOES IT GO?
>> Green waste goes to Hawaiian Earth Recycling in Wahiawa, which processes it into mulch and soil amendments such as compost.
>> Mixed recyclables are screened, separated and packed for shipping at the RRR Recycling plant at Campbell Industrial Park. According to its website: Corrugated cardboard and newspaper are sent largely to Asia to be remade into more cardboard, brown paper bags, more newspaper, wrapping paper and molded packaging. Aluminum cans are shipped to the mainland to be reprocessed into new aluminum cans and other products; glass bottles may be crushed and used as construction backfill locally, but much of it is shipped to the mainland to be melted into new glass products; plastics are shipped to the mainland or Asia to be remanufactured.
>> Trash largely goes to H-POWER to be burned for the heat that drives electrical generators; what can’t be incinerated goes to the landfill.
Kahikina oversees the city’s recycling program, which actually dates to 1989, when programs were authorized to divert business waste from the landfill and take other measures. It picked up steam during the administration of former Mayor Mufi Hannemann, when the curbside collections of recyclable paper, plastic and glass as well as green waste began.
Most recently, attention was drawn to the issue when the Office of the City Auditor issued the report, which does note that material recycling increased from about 75,000 tons in 1988 to more than 430,000 tons in 2016 (the 2017 figure, released after the audit, is nearly 435,000).
However, then-city Auditor Edwin S.W. Young, who has since retired, concluded that the city “could have reduced solid-waste disposal costs by $7 million and could have generated about $29.5 million in electricity revenues by diverting recycled waste to the H-POWER facility.”
The Chinese market had not yet dried up, but had become more selective. The more current problems that Young identified were the rising costs of processing the recyclables, partly due to state regulations requiring the state’s HI-5 deposit beverage containers to be separated from the mix.
But the largest processing cost came from the city’s financial obligation to the H-POWER contractor, Covanta Honolulu. That contract itself was found to be lacking in sufficient controls, according to a separate city audit, released in 2015.
Further, the 2017 recycling report pointed out that the contract guaranteed Covanta annual delivery of 800,000 tons of waste as its means of generating electricity revenue. The city had to pay for any lost revenue if the amount fell short — which it did every year, as that minimum was never attained, according to the audit.
These findings spurred the Honolulu City Council to introduce Resolution 17-311, concluding “that the diversion of recyclable materials to H-POWER will result in minimal impacts to the city’s environment because improvements made to H-POWER assure low levels of air and other types of pollution.” The measure urged the administration to effect that diversion “as expeditiously as possible.”
But this measure was tabled while the city’s waste-management plan update got underway, and there has been opposition to the idea from environmentalists and others.
Darren Park, the solid waste management coordinator for the state Department of Health, is one who sees a problem. The capacity of H-POWER to effectively reduce recyclable waste may have been overstated in the audit, he said. Glass cannot be handled this way, and incineration isn’t the best outcome for recyclable metals, he said.
Park supervises the state’s HI-5 program, which has endured its own set of challenges — including a decrease in the availability of locations for consumers to redeem their containers for the deposit nickel.
But it’s become a bit more sustainable after, about seven years ago, the container fee was increased from a penny to 1.5 cents per container. This has yielded enough to help cover program expenses, such as a subsidy to offset the sagging market value of the recyclable materials, Park said.
It also helps that about 2 percent of the deposits are not redeemed: Some people merely toss them into their curbside blue bins, he added: That money also remains in the state’s program account.
Kahikina sees potential for achieving savings for the city in other ways. Rather than shipping glass, which is very heavy, much more of it could be reused locally than is happening now.
Initial plans for producing “glassphalt” by substituting ground glass for aggregate in asphalt have proved impractical, Park said, because the combination reduces the life of the final product.
However, Kahikina said, the city has issued a request for proposals from potential contractors to produce sand and building materials from recycled glass. Other reduction strategies might help, too, she said, and organizations such as the Surfrider Foundation agree.
“Honolulu needs to begin progressive action, and any movement towards incineration in the short term needs to be paired with strong language in elimination of single-use items,” Rafael Bergstrom of the foundation’s Oahu chapter said in written testimony opposing Resolution 17-311.
“If this resolution included binding agreements to remove items like polystyrene from our waste streams and encourage more innovative recycling techniques, there would be more buy-in from our organization.
“All over the world there are groups who are reinventing ways to shred hard plastics (like non HI-5 detergent bottles) and turn them into reused products like park benches and shoes,” Bergstrom added. “Our island needs innovation, not a continuing of the status quo of disposal.”
