City officials say they are pleased with the curbside recycling program that began in 2007 and went islandwide in May 2010, but are working to get more Oahu residents to put newspaper, bottles and other "mixed recyclables" into their blue bins.
"There’s still material escaping into the gray bins (for household trash)," said Tim Steinberger, director of the city Department of Environmental Services.
BLUE BIN RECYCLING
Oahu residents are asked to place these "mixed recyclables" in their blue refuse bins:
» Aluminum cans (crushed OK)
» Glass bottles and jars
» Plastic containers with triangle code 1 and 2
» Newspaper
» Corrugated cardboard (flatten boxes; do not include noncorrugated cardboard like cereal boxes)
» For information: www.opala.org
Source: City Department of Environmental Services
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Last year the city collected 18,000 tons of mixed recyclables from about 160,000 households — but that’s only 52 percent of what could have been saved from going into the landfill, Steinberger said.
"When you compare it to other mainland cities, this is a very young program," Steinberger said. "That’s a pretty good number (52 percent) when you look at the metrics compared to the rest of the country."
The city wants to increase that figure so that 75 percent of eligible recyclables are getting thrown into the blue bins.
That would bring mixed-item recycling up to the current level of green-waste recycling on Oahu — 77 percent, "which is impressively high," Steinberger said.
It will conduct a survey soon to find out more about people’s attitudes and participation regarding the recycling program so it can develop an outreach campaign people will respond well to, said Suzanne Jones, city recycling branch chief.
The city’s curbside recycling program brought in a net total of $1.5 million last year. Increasing the percentage of eligible items recycled to 75 percent will divert 8,000 more tons of waste from the landfill and yield an additional $500,000 annually, for a total of $2 million in recycling-related revenue, the city said.
"It puts less of a burden on property taxes," Steinberger said.
Raising the bar would put Honolulu in a league with cities such as San Francisco and Austin, Texas.
"They (Austin) have recently become very aggressive in their program," Steinberger said.
To reach the 75 percent goal, 85 percent of residents would need to send 90 percent of their household’s recyclables into the blue bins, a consulting group hired by the city found.
Curbside recycling began as a pilot program in Mililani and Hawaii Kai in 2007 and spread to all Oahu communities in May 2010.
