21-05-26 EMC minutes - Laserfiche WebLink

Home

vendor that is working with the County. The reason why it is important to have the County involved is if this is state legislation, then in the different committees when there is testimony, all the state legislators will be looking to the counties to testify. Because the counties are the ones that actually handle the waste, not the State. Themain point to make is there’s a clear difference between models for extended producer responsibility and product stewardship. And it all has to do with who is going to take physical control of the materials. That is really the crux of the difference. This right here is a perfect example, talking about the paint. There are people, vendors, and entrepreneurs on this island who are already interested in collecting paint. One person with whom she had been talking had been working with Habitat for Humanity. So this excess paint in our community is a resource specifically for waste-to-wealth programs. For individuals who are underemployed, people coming out of the prisons, and off the streets. So we want to be very careful before we just jump in and make any kind of arrangements with these large scale operations or companies or businesses. She commends Chair Adams for raising those issues. It’s something we have to think about because this excess paint is a potential resource for our community. When it comes to extended producer responsibility and these different models, she doesn’t know if commissioners have read the legislation that was introduced this last session. The bill that was introduced by Rep. Lowen (HB 1316) was nearly 70 pages long. She read it, and it was very complex. The testimony from the Department of Health was that in the first year it would cost $750,000 to implement and regulate. It’s a very costly endeavor. So it’s important to look at models that will work for us. The direction that hing much simpler. It’s sort of like something happening with the e-waste program where you have manufacturers put money into a kitty, but then that’s about it. When we look at the e-waste program, it’s a perfect example of why you can’t entirely trust the manufacturers to handle it. They submit a plan, they put money into a fund, and then they run the program the way they want. So when you talk to people on the front lines of waste to wealth initiatives, they are concerned about this kind of model because it puts the producers in a position to round up all these resources and ship them off to an incinerator and put everybody in a position of consuming more and more and more and more. This is what we are trying not to do. Recycle Hawaii recommends an approach where we target the top manufacturers and producers of fast-moving consumer goods. There’s a rather short list that we could work with. There’s all kinds of methods for determining how much packaging waste they generate. This big discussion about extended producer responsibility versus product stewardship has quite a bit to do with packaging. And so we don’t need to target every last producer in the state. If you look at Rep. Lowen’s bill, she was targeting anyone who was doing at least $1 million of business in the State. That would include Big Island Candies, for example. The flood of testimony that came out against it was overwhelming. If we target the top producers and make them put money into fund, and we can decide between the solid waste management folks and the different counties on how it gets used, this is the approach that we are recommending. And in addition to that there is the Global Commitment for a New Plastics Economy. She has been preaching about this, trying to get people to look at their materials. It is a collaboration between the United Nations environmental program and the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. Out of the top 20 producers of fast-moving consumer goods, 16 of them are already signatories to this global commitment. Plastic is the crux of the problem. And when we 16