I was lucky enough to participate in the city’s Fall Tour de Trash earlier this year. What an important and eye-opening experience! Every Oahu citizen would be enlightened by it. Each moment of my tour demonstrated professionalism, aloha and commitment from the Department of Environmental Services (ENV) staff.
My initial inquiry was a phone conversation with the knowledgeable Michael Gillingham, who brilliantly explained to me the intricacies of exactly what can and cannot be recycled. This in itself required a scientific mind with insight into the thousands of chemicals and fossil fuels that comprise plastic waste.
From the moment we arrived at Kapolei Hale, we were warmly greeted by a dedicated team — including bus-trip hosts Amber Unabia, Lei Mahi and Hannah Bailey — and at the tour’s conclusion, a debriefing with Henry Gabriel Jr., the Refuse Division’s acting chief.
Our group consisted of a diverse sample of Oahu folks, all of whom care deeply about our aina.
The most important take-away from our visits — to the green waste facility of Hawaiian Earth Recycling (HER), the depot of RRR Recycling Services, the HPOWER plant and concluding at the vast Waimanalo Gulch landfill — was recognition of the intractability of attempting to “manage” enormous amounts of waste in a safe, efficient and effective system.
It became clear that these dedicated city staffers, and the private contractors, were being asked to solve crisis-level problems they did not create, nor possess the capacity to make “go away.” Because that capacity doesn’t exist .
The environmental and psychological stress created by this challenge places a tremendous burden on both the land and the skilled personnel tasked to “solve” these problems. The difficulty in securing a new landfill is only the most recent indicator. The city must depend on contractors (RRR, HER, HPOWER) and their “brokers” to take up the slack of the city’s delivery systems.
What we saw at these locations, particularly at RRR, were unsanitary working conditions. Workers shoveling mountains of teeming trash with no goggles, no gloves. When we asked RRR about the salaries of their employers, they ignored us. We saw workers crouched behind a rotten fence having their lunch — only feet away from trash heaps. When we asked where bales of materials were going to be shipped offshore, we got vague answers about it being handled by “brokers.”
My research into plastic pollution and waste management makes clear that these problems are not affecting Honolulu only, but locales all over the planet. The best science tells us that plastic never goes away, it poisons us all: in bloodstreams, ocean mammals and ocean pollution. The nonprofit Papahanaumokua Marine Debris Project just this month (December) removed 1 million pounds of debris from this site alone. Each year, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch floats closer and closer to Hawaii.
We all understand that the fossil fuel-petrochemical industries produce and market these products and then “export the negative and toxic externalities” to us — local governments and citizens to clean up.
Only global and national structural and economic reforms can deal with these issues. This is the context in which the local and dedicated ENV team struggles.
The Tour de Trash gave us a stark lesson in reality.
Everyone involved in the tour provided a great public service with excellence. In our closing talk story with the charismatic Gabriel, he clearly saw the big picture, and inspired us to be a part of the solution. His final comments were powerful, impactful. “You folks should come out here a couple of days after New Year’s.” It’s not hard to imagine what he and his team are up against. They are all heroes and top public servants.
Nancie Caraway, Ph.D., is a political scientist and advocate, and a former first lady of Hawaii.
