Recycling glass feels good but it’s costing Hawaii a lot

Next to watching videos of puppies and pandas, one of the best warm and fuzzy moments happens when you recycle stuff.

You are doing good and feel every little bit helps.

There is just a fulfilled sense of civic responsibility when you recycle all those papers, bags and bottles.

Good for you, but you may want to recheck your karma when it comes to bottles.

The state just came out with two new reports about Hawaii and used glass.

The bottom line is glass is winning and the state and county checkbooks are losing.

Between October 2012 and September 2013, we brought in 23,500 tons of glass bottles and jars. That includes 29,941,561 wine and spirit bottles, according to the state health department.

No wonder we always score so high in state happiness profiles. That bottle tally amounts to nearly 22 bottles of wine and booze for every resident of the state.

In Hawaii there are two types of glass: the bottles with a HI-5 stamp that you can recycle for a nickel, and everything else.

The everything-else category is not free. Importers pay a cent and a half to bring each bottle of Chateauneuf du Pape or Mott’s Applesauce into Hawaii.

In 2013, the state picked up a whopping $804,000 for all those bottles.

If the state or county collects the bottles and tries to recycle them, it costs much more than the 11⁄2 cents we charge to bring the glass into Hawaii.

The shipping charge last year was $116 per ton of glass. The glass is taken to Strategic Materials in Oakland, Calif., which pays Hawaii between $5 and $9 a ton for the glass.

"Economically, this is not an attractive option," the state auditor’s report notes.

So if we are going broke by hauling the glass around the Pacific, why not get the same warm recycling feeling by using it here?

The report (http://goo.gl/ U3pdSv) does an excellent job of chewing on this idea.

First, there is really no demand here to melt the glass and reuse it as is done on the mainland. So you have to grind it up and use it for some sort of filler.

Glass is safe stuff. It won’t hurt the environment, but there is still little to use it for. You can mix it with soil, you can use it for ground cover, you can spread it around on dirt roads for traction, or you could dump it on the beach.

"The potential demand for beach nourishment sand is very high in Hawaii and the available local sand sources have significant environmental impacts," the report said.

The 2012 Waikiki sand replenishment project is already running into problems as much of the sand is gone, so are we ready for a Waikiki Beach in subtle shades of Heineken green?

The report added that Florida actually studied using crunched-up glass as sand and it was decided it was too expensive and there were "aesthetic impacts."

The glass bottle battle, the report notes, could be won by raising the bottle charge.

The report does not go into the political impact caused when the folks bringing all the bottles to Hawaii start charging more.

As all this goes into the "no good deed goes unpunished" file, consider that last year the state Legislature, noting that across the country "an estimated 150 million strings of Christmas lights are sold each year," directed the state Department of Health to study if we should have a Christmas tree light recycling program.

Richard Borreca writes on politics on Sundays, Tuesdays and Fridays. Reach him at rborreca@staradvertiser.com.