The city’s counterintuitive pilot project to make bulky item pick up more efficient and effective by making it even less available has been roundly criticized by residents who are watching with dismay as piles pile up in their neighborhoods.
Every complaint seems to be met with the same response: People need to be trained to generate less trash.
Which is absolutely true, though this pilot program is probably not the way to go about doing that.
The city Department of Environmental Services uses a startling statistic: In the past 10 years, Honolulu saw an 80% increase in tonnage of trash. That makes sense in the decade of to-go cups, pre-made meals and “individually packaged snacked sized servings.”
But that’s not what is growing in great heaps on city streets this hot, hot summer.
It’s those ubiquitous pressboard bookshelves, broken baby strollers, car parts and, underneath it all like the base layer of a nasty cake, a stained mattress or two or three.
Nobody wants that stuff. Scavengers might take a chance on a termite-gnawed chest of drawers or crooked plastic CD racks, but those mattresses are irredeemable, and when a dead mattress lies on a sidewalk or weedy lot, it’s like a magnet for other trash.
So why are there so many dead mattresses being thrown away?
Maybe because people are more transient now than ever before. Whereas families used to settle into one house or apartment, people come and go more frequently. With every move comes a purge.
The vacation rental market probably adds to situation. Furniture that is used by many people gets beat up and needs to be replaced more often.
Newer homes don’t have the cute built-in shelving of older homes, and it’s hard to find furniture in Hawaii that isn’t made of pressboard or particle board that swells and warps with the humidity. Dad isn’t in the garage making wood furniture for the house much these days, and what’s left over from the pieces that grandpa made have to be fiercely guarded from termites determined to turn everything into dust.
Donating items to nonprofits that do refurbishing and resale is a great idea and one the city advocates as a way to reduce the amount of stuff people throw away. Several, like Big Brothers Big Sisters and United Cerebral Palsy, offer free pickup of donated items. But the catch is that the items need to be in good working order. The list of things these places will not accept include wall-to-wall carpeting and padding, toilets and toilet seats, car parts, tires, wheels, large appliances, baby gear, TVs, exercise equipment, broken mirrors, water heaters and those nasty mattresses.
In other words, all the stuff that’s piling up on city streets.
Getting people to change their habits, buy less stuff, repair rather than replace, is a lofty goal but one probably best approached from the front end when purchases are made, not on the back end when the items are truly trash.
