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Oahu generates of solid waste annually from residential, commercial and industrial sources, and taxpayers spend millions of dollars each year dealing with it.

It’s shipped off island, burnt for energy, sorted and recycled to varying degrees. A visit to the processing facilities this summer revealed how it all works — and the many ways that people are doing it wrong, only adding to the public’s cost.

Meanwhile, the city’s current landfill is rapidly reaching capacity, and city officials are desperately searching for a spot by the end of this year to build a new one, an estimated $210 million project. That makes any improvements on the consumer end — like making sure the right recyclables end up in the right can — all the more important, as it can help divert some of the waste and buy more time.

The island’s infrastructure provides four pathways for waste — three of which are utilized by through the city’s curbside collection program, though there are plans to include 20,000 more that are still on a trash-only route.

Trash in the gray cart is burned at H-POWER, the island’s waste-to-energy power plant. Recycling in the blue cart is sorted at Reduce Reuse Recyclers Services, then shipped. Green waste such as in the green cart are composted at Hawaiian Earth Recycling. And non-combustible construction and demolition debris are in the Waimanalo Gulch Sanitary Landfill.

The future of the 200-acre municipal landfill on the Westside remains unclear after an advisory committee rejected possible site locations. H-POWER and recycling facilities have helped stall the landfill from reaching capacity, but experts say more could be done.

Last month, Civil Beat joined members of , Ìý²¹²Ô»å , a local environmental nonprofit, on an islandwide tour of Oahu’s solid waste systems to learn more. Here are the primary takeaways.

Recycling Abroad

Oahu launched the blue cart program in 2007 and contracted RRR, a in Kapolei that sorts and packs recycling materials to be sold.

Manasseh Santos, the RRR operations manager, said in the last 14 years, he has found everything from car parts to garden hoses and basketballs in the recycling collection.

“I have to scold my neighbors all the time,” Santos said. “I walk out of the house and I’ll see them put stuff in the blue bin just because their trash bin is full.”

In May 2022, it cost the city of mixed recyclables, including paper, aluminum, plastic and glass, through the curbside blue cart program — a number that with the . On , Santos said RRR processes about 400,000 pounds of material each day.

currently accepts cardboard, newspaper, office paper, paper bags, aluminum, steel, bi-metal, glass containers, and of the of plastic that exist, only two are eligible.

What most people don’t understand, is that while these items are accepted here — nothing is recycled on island. Everything is shipped off to buyers around the world. And while there are several reasons why Honolulu doesn’t accept more recycling or have its own like other states on the mainland, the main reason is the lack of space.

But even with more recycling plants, there’s still a lot of waste ending up in landfills. Earlier this year, two environmental groups, and , published a that says of the 40 million tons of plastic waste from the U.S. in 2021, 85% went to landfills, 10% was incinerated, and only about 5% was recycled.

Before China’s “National Sword” policy in January 2018 banned the import of most plastics, Oahu was shipping most of its recyclables to China. Since then, the island has started shipping to several other countries, such as .

Jim Puckett, founder and executive director of the , has fought the practice of exporting waste to developing countries, which already struggle to manage their own waste streams and face the toxic effects of plastic pollution.

“If you followed the waste from Hawaii, and actually went to Malaysia and scrutinized the facility, I think you would be extremely alarmed at how bad it really is,” he said.

Farhan Nasa, the project coordinator for the , which is made up of a number of environmental groups committed to public awareness and improving waste trade policies, said their local facilities are already overwhelmed with their own waste, and do not have the infrastructure to take on foreign imports.

“The recycling problem is a global issue, but less developed countries such as mine end up on the receiving end of the toxic effects of plastic pollution brought by the indifference and callous disregard by developed countries such as the U.S. — by choosing to dump their waste on us,” Nasa said.

Currently, Santos said Oahu’s aluminum is shipped to Los Angeles, while the rest of the collected blue-cart items travel to Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines. RRR ships out an average of 10 containers every day, each loaded with 220 bales of trash, weighing roughly 1,200 pounds apiece.

Besides being better educated about what RRR accepts, Santos said he wishes people would take the lids and caps off of their bottles, and stop putting their recycling in bags.

In a perfect world, Santos said people would dump their items directly in the blue cart — a simple step that would save his workers from ripping open each bag and hours of sorting. He also added that plastic bags tend to get caught in the chains of the machines which often need to be replaced.

The two types of plastic that RRR does take are polyethylene terephthalate, which is used to make items such as beverage and condiment bottles, and high-density polyethylene, which is used for items such as milk cartons and detergent bottles.

Everything else that is tossed in the blue cart that doesn’t belong there, such as plastic wrap, straws, or any recyclable items that weren’t rinsed out are all deemed contaminated, and passed on to H-POWER for incineration.

In fiscal year 2022, RRR hauled 7,661 tons of non-recyclable or contaminated material to H-POWER, averaging four to five loads a day, according to Markus Owens, spokesman for the city’s Department of Environmental Services. If less material was contaminated or non-recyclable, that would mean fewer trips to the incinerator and less wasted time.

From Trash To Ash

While other islands mostly rely on landfills, Oahu has the option of burning its trash for energy.

As a city owned and operated facility that has been running since 1990, the power plant receives waste from the gray carts, incinerates it, and produces up to 10% of Oahu’s electricity — one ton of trash generates on average 535 kwh of electricity exported to the HECO grid.

The city’s current contract runs until August 2032, and is part of a public-private partnership with .

Owens said it was determined to be in the city’s best interest to extend the contract when it did so a decade ago, and that it prevented excessive costs from contractors during a transition period while maintaining regulatory compliance and the existing workforce.

H-POWER has an annual revenue of $70 million from Hawaiian Electric Company, $52 million in fees based on the amount of waste received, and $3 million through metal recycling. Covanta shares the revenue generated from the electricity that it produces with the city.

In its contract, the city agreed to provide a guaranteed amount of 800,000 tons of trash, based on the waste stream and the 20-year projections during extension negotiations in 2008.

But Honolulu has struggled to meet this target, which costs taxpayers about $12 for each ton the city falls short.

Prior to the addition of the at H-POWER, the city was required to provide the guaranteed amount of 561,000 tons in solid waste, at which point Oahu was still tons short of the agreed upon amount, and paid over $6.2 million for lost electrical revenue, at around $16 per ton.

After the addition of the third boiler, the economic recession hit in 2009 and reduced the waste stream by approximately 20%. The shortfalls have ranged from, and it is estimated that the lost electrical energy revenues by H-POWER will continue to cost the city over $1 million a year.

Without the incinerator, which reduces the volume of trash by about 90%, the landfill would reach capacity in four years, according to Owens. The 300 to 400 trucks of trash, which weigh about 4 million pounds, that are incinerated each day become 20 to 25 trucks of ash that go to the landfill, and seven metal loads go to recyclers such as Schnitzer Steel and Island Recycling.

Recently, the city awarded a contract to Covanta for the reuse of ash from H-POWER. The goal is to treat and screen the ash while recovering metals and materials for construction, Owens said. He added that the project may potentially divert 60-80% of the ash from the landfill. A notice to proceed for the first phase — planning, permitting and design — was issued in June.

While trash in a landfill generates odor, gas and leachate while attracting birds, rats and insects, ash is stable and sets up like concrete. The ash that is put in the landfill is isolated from the environment, sampled quarterly and has no impact on the soil, according to Owens.

Though recovering energy from trash avoids the import of one barrel of fuel oil for every 2,000 pounds of trash, environmental advocates like Ray Aivazian, founder of , and Kahi Pacarro, director of , say burning our waste is not the answer.

Pacarro equated the relationship the city has with H-POWER to “feeding the beast,” noting the extra charges incurred for not providing enough waste.

“We’re paying for it in tax dollars,” he said. “It’s unacceptable. We should be starving the beast.”

Other than tax dollars, we may also be paying for it through the air we breathe. In 2020, H-POWER emitted into the atmosphere — one of the main reasons that the has recommended against classifying electricity from trash incinerators as .

No one wants to be surrounded by landfills, Aivazian said, but it shouldn’t be an either-or situation.

“Instead of encouraging people to consume and produce more waste to fill a quota, we should be promoting plans to create material recycling facilities on island,” Aivazian said. “With us having our own facilities in Hawaii we will create new jobs, cut back on the amount of material we are importing, and significantly reduce our CO2 footprint.”

Car Engines Are Not Green Waste

Santos at RRR and Marvin Min, senior vice president of Hawaiian Earth, are both paying employees to sort through contaminated waste.

Established in 1993, Hawaiian Earth is the largest producer of compost in the state, and has since diverted over 2 million tons of green waste.

As part of the three-cart program, the city pays Hawaiian Earth $866,990 a year to collect and process green waste. Annually, it collects 140,000 tons of green waste from the three-cart curbside collection program, which take about a year to break down into 70,000 tons of soil, mulch and erosion control products.

“If only we could get people to stop throwing their dog waste bags into the green bin,” Min said, adding that amongst other items that don’t belong there, they have found dead animals and even car engines in the green cart.

Hawaiian Earth has four employees who are responsible for picking out contamination but inevitably can’t find it all, which explains why some farmers have been finding plastic in compost and soil made from the island’s green waste. In all, Min said each month about 20 tons of collected green waste is deemed contaminated and hauled off to H-POWER.

The company is expected to help the island divert even more of its waste beginning in 2024 when the city rolls out a designated bin for food waste that will be composted at Hawaiian Earth. Min said this project, which the city announced in June, has been a decade in the making.

Nonprofit organizations have also started offering composting solutions for the community. In May, the state Department of Health gave Ìý²¹²Ô»å its partners approval to launch its  composting system that will allow anyone with a subscription to bring in food scraps and buy the soil the company produces from it.

Based on the city’s , over 20% of residential waste collected from the gray cart is food waste, presenting another significant way to lessen the load on the landfill, and in turn taxpayers.

“Moving forward, I think we can make a positive impact on our environment, as long as we educate our consumers on how to do the right thing,” Min said.