Recycling Report Card: Oahu’s new waste audit 
measures effectiveness and points to next directions
by Suzanne Jones and Mark White

Right from the start, the City & County of Honolulu’s recycling effort focused on the commercial sector. It was just common sense. Businesses generate more waste, more recyclable material and have more opportunity to save money through recycling than residential recycling programs. The City helped form the Partnership for the Environment in 1992 and, working together with businesses, started to “push” commercial sector recycling forward with mandatory requirements. Disposal bans and restrictions on cardboard, green waste, metals, appliances and tires went into effect in 1994; and laws requiring office buildings to recycle paper and bars and restaurants to recycle glass began in 1996. Food waste recycling laws followed in 1997. City agencies have been required by law to recycle since 1990 and to purchase only recycled-content paper since 1993. In fact, the City has developed some of the most realistic and economically feasible recycling policies in the country, primarily aimed at increasing commercial sector recycling activity.
Paper recycling is now commonplace in city buildings. Every evening, Honolulu’s bars and restaurants set out hundreds of barrels of glass containers for recycling pickup. Truckloads of green waste are hauled into mulching and composting facilities on both sides of the island, and the City is planning a third facility to compost a mix of green waste, sludge and food waste. Cardboard recycling for the big generators, such as shopping centers, has been the mainstay of the recycling industry for years.

So what has all this gotten for us? What are the recovery rates? The answers became a lot clearer after the City contracted a team of specialists to conduct a waste composition analysis of Oahu’s garbage. Dressed in rubber boots and all kinds of special protective gear, the team sorted through your refuse, dividing and measuring it into 40 categories. The study took months to complete, starting in May 1998 and finishing in February 1999. The team hired by the City has done over 1,000 of these studies for other communities. It’s what they do, and they do it well. The audit team measured each type of material contained in the hundreds of samples taken, and then statistically projected that data to all of the waste on Oahu. The results of the waste composition analysis are accurate to within 10 percent.

We now know a lot more about the waste we generate and our next directions in recycling. For example, the study confirmed that 25-30% of our residential waste is green waste, which gave the City the needed justification to move forward with the new curbside green waste collection program now servicing more than 100,000 homes.
All of our bars and restaurants seem to be up to speed with glass recycling (the team checked their dumpsters, too). Oahu is currently recycling 43% of the glass containers generated. Our goal was 50+%. Based on the study data, the City plans to encourage more residential glass recovery by increasing the number of community recycling centers and providing more assistance to condominiums in setting up recycling programs.
Office buildings don’t seem to be capturing as much of the paper as they might. The waste audit indicates that the commercial sector generates about 14,000 tons of high-grade office paper annually, but less than 5,000 tons is being recycled. Approximately 150 commercial office buildings are affected by the City’s recycling mandates. Inspections to date indicate that their recycling programs are in place, but not all of the tenants are participating. Furthermore, there are still other large generators of office paper that are not affected by the City’s mandate and have yet to formalize their recycling programs, including State office facilities and educational institutions. Plus, paper markets have been struggling the past two to three years, providing little economic incentive to the recycling industry to aggressively go after paper. More tenant education and a coordinated push by the State, coupled with some market improvement, may do the trick.
More than 50% of the concrete and 90% of the asphalt paving debris generated by construction and demolition is being recycled. Not bad. Over 68% of Oahu’s ferrous metals (cars, appliances, tin cans) is getting recycled. Aluminum cans and other non-ferrous metals have continued with a high recycling rate of 57%. H-POWER has been extracting ferrous metals from the mixed waste since it began operation in 1990 and has recently added a state-of-the-art extraction system to capture the non-ferrous metals from the ash, which should further increase recycling rates in 1999. Although these recovery rates are good, there is room for improvement, especially in the area of metal recovery at the landfill.
Only 26% of the newspaper and 30% of the cardboard is getting recycled. Newspaper recovery could increase somewhat with improvements in office building recycling efforts, but significant increases will require more residential collection. We expected higher cardboard recycling rates because of the disposal restrictions on cardboard. The City obviously needs to improve enforcement efforts at the disposal sites. However, Oahu’s cardboard recycling rate also may be compromised by a number of factors. The baseline includes unrecyclable cardboard - waxed and/or contaminated by food waste. Also, some large generators of cardboard are shipping it themselves directly to the mainland for recycling, bypassing the Oahu recycling processors and thus the City’s tracking.

Overall, Oahu generates more than 1.5 million tons of refuse annually. Over 460,000 tons of material was recycled. H-POWER processed over 600,000 tons, and the remaining 500,000 tons went to landfill. So how do Oahu’s recycling efforts compare with cities elsewhere?
This is a hard question to answer considering that the markets for recycled materials are a major factor in recycling. Both the markets for recycled materials and Hawaii’s economy have been depressed for the last several years, while the economy in mainland communities has been much better. And mainland communities do not suffer Hawaii’s shipping costs to get recyclables to market. Even with these challenges, the City has been successful at developing innovative and effective recycling programs, especially in the commercial sector where the opportunities are greatest. Most mainland communities began their recycling programs years ago with household collection systems that capture between 3% and 7% of their waste stream. They have only just started to make in-roads into their business communities. Honolulu decided to work the business side first, which has captured larger volumes of material for recycling and minimized the public cost.
The City is currently assessing the value of a more aggressive residential collection system, i.e. a curbside pickup service, including the costs of an additional island-wide pickup service and a projection of just how much material recovery we can expect for our money. Data from Oahu’s new waste audit have helped clarify some of the key issues. This subject deserves its own full discussion and will be presented later this year once the evaluation is complete.—Suzanne Jones has worked as the Recycling Coordinator for the City & County of Honolulu for the past 10 years. She is also the coordinator of the Partnership for the Environment. Mark White is the principal of Solid Waste Associates, a national waste management and recycling consulting firm. He is also a member of the Partnership’s advisory board.