The City Council inserted $2.4 million into the city’s $1.96 billion operating budget last week to restore and expand the city’s "white bin" community recycling program at Oahu schools, but that doesn’t mean Mayor Peter Carlisle will continue it.
A spokesman for the city Department of Environmental Services said the city is moving forward with plans to close out the program as scheduled on June 30.
Markus Owens, public information officer for the Department of Environmental Services, said Director Tim Steinberger wants to sit down with city Recycling Coordinator Suzanne Jones, who was out of the office last week, and other members of the Refuse Division on how to proceed in light of the Council’s action.
The city could choose to extend the current contract, seek bids from vendors for a new contract or proceed with the original plan of ending the city’s involvement with white bins, Owens said. Or, there might be other options, he said.
The Carlisle administration announced at the end of April that due to diminishing returns from an annual $1.5 million investment, it would end sponsorship of the program that allowed schools and other community groups to earn money by letting the public drop their recyclable items in specially marked white bins, a program that has been around for more than 20 years.
The administration said that with the growing number of households switching to curbside recycling service, habits are changing, and much less is placed into the bins that once netted schools as much as $1,000 a month for the bottles, cans, newspapers, cardboard and other recyclable material. About 160,000 Oahu homes get curbside recycling service, and the city plans to reach the remaining 20,000 single-family households beginning later this year.
The first of the bins are due to be removed Friday, but Honolulu Disposal Co., which has had the $1.5 million annual contract to provide 100 bins, has said it would continue to maintain about half the locations without paying the schools. The bins would stay in locations where the volume of recyclable items justifies the cost of hauling the bins, sorting and baling the materials and shipping the loads off island.
But the City Council’s Budget Committee received testimony from the public urging that the program be continued, and last month inserted $2.4 million into the operating budget.
The funding comes with a stipulation that part of the money be used for development of "an integrated education and outreach plan to support and expand" the white bin program.
Testimony came from student groups and residents who live in apartments, condominiums or other dwellings without curbside recycling.
Kaneohe resident Lori Adolewski wrote that the school white bin she uses is nearly always full.
"I take all my collectibles, whether refundable or not, to my nearest school bin," she said. "I find it hard to believe that these bins don’t bring in any money or are underused."
Kaylee Baduria, a seventh-grade leadership representative at Ewa Makai Middle School, said groups at her school rely on the income generated by the waste that’s collected by Honolulu Disposal.
"If we get this taken away from us, then we would not be able to build funds for the other green sustainability initiatives," she said.
Council Budget Chairwoman Ann Kobayashi said the arguments were persuasive to her and her colleagues.
"If you take the white bins out of the schools, they’ll have no way to recycle," she said. "They’ll just throw stuff in the trash."
Kobayashi acknowledged that the Council could not force the administration to spend the money to continue the program and said she would not be surprised if it chose to do nothing with the appropriation.
