As most of us know, land is Hawaii’s most limited resource. It is critical that we find a way to preserve our natural environment while dealing with the waste produced by those of us who live and work here. A member of the City and County’s Partnership for the Environment, Odgen’s Honolulu Resource Recovery Venture (HRRV), is working hard to achieve that delicate balance.

As operators of Oahu’s H-POWER facility, HRRV takes the waste that is generated each day on the island and converts it into electrical energy. As part of its waste-to-energy process, the facility also recovers ferrous and non-ferrous metal from the waste stream for recycling.
“We sell the non-ferrous and ferrous metals to local recyclers who in turn sell it to the recyclable goods market,” notes Facility Manager Bill McCraw. By processing more than 561,600 tons of waste each year at its Campbell Industrial Park facility, there is a reduction of the volume of waste that ends in the landfill by approximately 90 percent. And that’s not all. The facility recently unveiled a revolutionary ash reutilization program that takes a portion of the ash from the plant and blends it into an asphalt mix.

If the results from this pilot program show that the blend has no negative impact on the environment, Hawaii will have another way to pave its highways and roads, and have even fewer materials going into its landfills. As one of the leaders in the field of waste recovery and recycling HRRV is also assisting the City and County of Honolulu in investigating the use of ash as a landfill cover. If it’s found to work, landfills will be able to reduce the use of Hawaii’s precious soil as a daily cover.

Ferrous metals are magnetically extracted during the preprocessing of refuse at H-POWER.	H-POWER recovers more than 20,000 tons annually of ferrous and non-ferrous metals for recycling.