Don’t revive fee discount for recyclers

The Honolulu City Council is weighing a bill that would reinstate a significant discount in the disposal fees recyclers pay to the city. The measure, Bill 50, has found some favor with members who passed it out of the Budget Committee last week.

This legislation, which was backed in public testimony almost entirely by the metals recycling industry, should be stopped. It’s a bad idea, and on more than one front.

One reason has been identified by city administration officials worried about balancing the books: The proposed discount of about 65 percent would cost the city $1.5 million in revenues each year. There’s no plan to replace that income, so the deficit could lead to a cut in city services. Inevitably, it would fall to the taxpayer to make up the difference.

But more broadly than the fiscal headache it would create, it would resurrect a subsidy that an established business should no longer need. The recycled-materials market is prey to fluctuations that are beyond the city’s control. Taxpayers shouldn’t be expected to smooth out the rough ride businesses take on the commodities market.

In short, the disposal fee discount is no longer a prudent or cost-effective way of achieving the city’s often-stated goal: reducing the waste that goes to the landfill.

It wasn’t always the case. When the city ramped up its efforts to manage the municipal waste stream, it began in the early 1990s to discount the tipping fee for the young recycling industry as a way to help it meet a community need. The recyclers dump the residue left after processing the recyclable materials, and the discount has ranged from 20 percent to 80 percent over the intervening decades.

But the discount was discontinued about 18 months ago. Ross Tanimoto, deputy environmental services director, said the city saw it did not change the volume of recycling residue going to the city and, he said, "we don’t feel that further discounts are necessary to keep the program running.

The chief beneficiary of the fee reduction, Tanimoto testified, would be Schnitzer Steel. Jennifer Hudson, associate general counsel for Schnitzer Steel, said in written testimony that the discount would help counter the fact that market prices for recycled metals are at a six-year low.

But other materials reclaimed from the waste stream, such as plastic beverage containers, also are garnering lower market prices, largely because they’re petroleum-based products and oil prices have dropped. There’s no reason why taxpayers should bear the brunt of the ups-and-downs in any of these businesses.

"This bill may provide an enticement to dispose at the landfill," Tanimoto added — an enticement in opposition to city goals.

That is a fair assumption.

City Council member Ann Kobayashi, who chairs the Budget Committee, observed that the city waste- management department depends on the funding that tipping fees provide.

"So do we subsidize the department or the businesses?" she asked rhetorically.

The answer is that the city should support the interests of taxpayers, which would be better served by a broader effort to reduce the waste stream — namely, one that addresses the proliferation of single-item, single-use packaging.

The Council has already moved in that direction, with the ban on single-use plastic bags in most general retail outlets on the island. Shoppers are adapting to the change in supermarkets and sundry stores without much distress, and clearly can handle a stronger law that would close the unnecessary exceptions and end-runs in the current law.

But for now, the best strategy is to start changing the culture of waste through public education; other cities, such as Seattle and San Francisco, have made consumer waste reduction a prominent part of their public policy.

Ultimately, it comes down to a matter of personal responsibility: Once the public more fully understands the environmental impact of overloading the city’s waste-management system, Oahu residents can begin to change their habits, carrying their own water in reusable containers rather than disposable water bottles, for example, a practice growing in popularity.

It’s time for Oahu residents and their policymakers to recognize that this island community needs to take a new direction, one that discourages waste production.

Honolulu has taken baby steps in that direction and, considering that other cities are further along in the culture change, it’s plain that this one could do much better.