Given that Oahu has limited space (being and island and all) and nearly 900,000 residents, 100,000 military personnel, and over 100,000 tourists on any given day, you would think that Honolulu would try to minimize the waste going to landfills. Somehow, that doesn’t seem to be a concern, and given that I’ve been conditioned to living in urban areas that try to minimize waste to landfills, I’ve been feeling very guilty about the stuff I’ve been putting in the trash.
First, it is extremely hard to recycle. There is no city-sponsored recycling, so people and businesses have to pay a private company to pick up their recyclables or bring them to a community recycling center if they choose to do so, while trash pickup is free, which seems to completely discourage recycling. There is a deposit on plastic and glass bottles, so some people have set up recycling boxes to raise money for their favorite school or club, but other than that, I haven’t seen a single recycling bin. At the house where I’m renting the room, glass, plastic, cans, and paper all go in the trash, and that seems to be the norm. I couldn’t even recycle a glass bottle at Starbucks!
Second, no one seems to care about giving people unnecessary non-biodegradable disposables. At work we generally get take-out food for lunch, and a lot of it comes in unnecessarily bulky packaging. We got ramen noodle soup for lunch yesterday, and they give you the noodles and vegetables in a separate container from the broth, so you get two large styrofoam containers instead of one, but once you get to where you’re eating, you combine them into one bowl. Why do there need to be two bowls? The worst example of all was at the UH baseball game on Thursday. They gave me my hotdog and french fries (each in their own packages) on a 11″x17″ styrofoam tray. I checked – it wasn’t a corn-based biodegradable version. It was thick and stiff polystyrene foam, in a quanitity I haven’t seen since McDonalds was keeping the hot side hot and the cold side cold in the 80’s. I think they would stone you to death in San Francisco for serving food on trays like that. And I don’t think anyone who stoned you to death would be sent to jail by a jury of their peers. Seriously? A styrofoam tray? Why?
I checked the Hawaii Department of Environmental Services website, and they are starting to roll out curbside recycling this fall, and it should be available throughout the greater Honolulu area by May 2010. Maybe they’ll eventually outlaw polystyrene trays too…
I also learned that most of Oahu’s waste is converted to energy at H-POWER: Honolulu Program of Waste Energy Recovery. After separating out most of the metals, they incinerate the trash, reducing the volume by 90% and providing 7% of Oahu’s energy. Hawaii currently doesn’t ship any of its trash away from the islands. It still would be better to reduce waste, recycle, and compost, but at least they’re not just throwing all the trash in a landfill, or shipping it halfway across the world.
