Our state and city governments just can’t get a handle on costly recycling programs

Welcome to the city and state departments of “I’m going to scream and pull out all of my hair.”

Both the city and state have recently produced audits of the various city and state recycling programs; each notes that neither the city nor the state is doing the job and that it has been repeatedly told of its failings.

Back in the days before Honolulu’s garbage to energy plant, HPOWER, was up and running, its top supporter, former Mayor Frank F. Fasi, liked to paint himself the trend-setting environmentalist.

HPOWER would save Oahu land, remove garbage from landfills, and make a tidy profit by selling the newly generated electricity to Hawaiian Electric Co.

First problem with HPOWER was the site: it was to be in Waipahu on the old sugar mill land and where absolutely not a single Waipahu resident was hoping to see a day-and-night procession of smelly garbage trucks dumping off their loads. Then, the first version of HPOWER came without any air scrubbers to clean the smoke resulting from burning garbage. The project’s cost spiraled from millions of dollars to hundreds of millions during the decade-long debate before HPOWER opened in 1990. To be fair, the city notes that HPOWER reduces the volume of waste by 90 percent through incineration with the resulting 10 percent ash going to landfill.

Back to today: the State Auditor’s series of reports pointing out that the bottle recycling program does not work, does not recycle any bottles and costs the city, state and consumers extra expense.

Last year’s audit dryly noted “that the cost of recycling non-deposit glass containers exceeded the amount of revenue collected by the State.”

As far as the bottle business, the state pays you to bring back the bottle and then ships it back to to be recycled. So it pays twice.

Recent state studies, however, point out that the mainland glass shipped to Hawaii as beer bottles is shipped back to Strategic Materials near Oakland, Calif., which buys it for between $5 and $9 a ton.

The reason to start pulling out your hair is that shipping charges the state pays for sending recyclable material back to California is approximately $120 per ton.

Even a state legislator can figure out that selling something for $9 when it costs you $120 is not the path to financial sustainability.

Now, on to the city and its own plan to make recycling needlessly cost taxpayers more money.

A recent city audit explains that if the city actually burned what it could of recyclable material it collects instead of shipping it overseas to be recycled, it could have saved $7 million between 2013 and 2016.

The problem now with HPOWER is that the city is not feeding it enough garbage. If the city sent its collected recyclables to the burners on Sand Island, it would have generated another $29.5 million in saved electrical costs.

According to a recent Star-Advertiser report: “The city contracts with Covanta Honolulu to run HPOWER, and it must send that operator 800,000 tons of waste a year or else pay the difference. From 2013 to 2105 the city paid out $6.2 million to cover the tons it missed and their lost electricity revenues, according to the auditor’s report.”

No politician ever wants to promise to kill a recycling program, or be the person who said stop returning your bottles because it costs the state too much money. So the city and state’s continued financial mismanagement of their recycling programs is likely to just go on.

Richard Borreca writes on politics on Sundays. Reach him at 808onpolitics@gmail.com.