Not all good intentions have their optimal effect when they’re enforced as a matter of law. Even the restaurant and food-industry executives who have spoken out against a food-recovery bill at the Honolulu City Council acknowledge that there is cause for concern about the disposition of so much wasted food in a city with a hungry and homeless population.

But Council members have, at the urging of those interest groups, moved to shelve the legislation they had considered, and that was the right outcome.

The Council’s Public Works, Infrastructure and Sustainability Committee has deferred Bill 9, a proposal to require that larger food establishments on Oahu separate and prepare food waste for collection and processing as donations. The measure would have affected a restaurant or catering business of 5,000 square feet or more of floor area that serves 400 or more prepared meals per day, on average.

Also included were food courts, hotels with kitchens and one or more function rooms, a market of 18,000 square feet or more, a food manufacturer or processor occupying 5,000 square feet or more of floor area and a hospital averaging 400 or more prepared patient meals per day.

The impetus to regulate food waste is driven by different factors around the country. In some areas, the goal is to reduce what goes to the landfill, and on Oahu, the waste-to-energy HPOWER plant has mitigated that concern.

The city Department of Environmental Services testified against a similar bill proposed in the state Legislature during the 2016 session, disputing the assertion that diverting food from HPOWER has no effect on the system’s efficiency.

However, the amount of wasted food that could be and should be diverted to the needy is nonetheless a distressing and presumably avoidable outcome. Estimates of the food thrown out on Oahu range widely. The city department, in its testimony on the state bill last year, put it at 39,000 tons annually.

Meanwhile, Aloha Harvest, a nonprofit that rescues and redelivers food to social service agencies, said 273,000 tons of food either goes to HPOWER or the Waimanalo Gulch Sanitary Landfill.

Either statistic is insupportable. That is why Councilwoman Ann Kobayashi introduced the bill, and why organizations such as the Hawaii Food Industry Association testified that it “supports the overall intent.”

However, said the association’s executive director, Lauren Zirbel, the mandate would have a considerable negative effect on restaurant operators and some supermarkets because it would pose substantial burdens.

For example, Zirbel said in written testimony, the costs of separating and on-site storage of food waste are too high for some businesses to support, adding that the bill included no hardship exemption.

Kobayashi has said she still wants to find other ways to repurpose this food for the benefit of the needy, and it appears the private sector is also willing to work on improving the mechanisms already in place.

The stakeholders have a lot of ideas they can pore through, as this issue has been studied thoroughly by national groups. For example, the Harvard Law School Food Law and Policy Clinic published “Keeping Food Out of the Landfill,” a toolkit identifying some tax incentives the federal government provides, especially to nonprofits.

But these would not apply to most of the food operations being targeted locally, so additional state tax incentives should be explored. And there are ways that food could be recycled as livestock feed, reducing a key cost item for small farmers.

It’s time to find a better use for Oahu’s food abundance. And it appears that there’s also an abundance of willingness to improve — from the nonprofit and for-profit players who should cooperate on a workable plan.