2011-04-08 Cost of Government Commission Minutes

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MR. BUKLAREWICZ: Paul Buklarewicz, I am the Executive Director for Recycle Hawai‘i and I guess we had a flurry of Emails between myself, Marilyn and Eileen about the sad state of electronic waste collections here on this island and then pay as you throw also came up in the discussion. I offered to bring a hard copy of this 13 year old 1999 recommendations developed by Recycle Hawai‘i on rural community pay as you throw system. Back in 99 this was a trend on mainland communities to incentivize recycling while at the same time having residents pay for throwing away whatever is non-recyclable. There’s a number of recommendations for ordinance changes throughout here which would have to go through before such a system could be implemented here. So I thought I would just bring this plan. It was introduced through the solid waste management committee. I served on Mayor Kim’s solid waste advisory committee where we reviewed the integrated resource solid waste management plan. So it was brought up, at that time it was kind of set aside, nobody really wanted to touch it with a ten foot pole because it did involve paying to throw away rubbish and there’s a number of ways it could be done: assign a special type of bag, people self haul the rubbish to the transfer station and they only pay for rubbish that is non-recyclable. Recycling is free. So it’s a system of bringing in some revenues to help pay for solid waste management costs and at the same time incentivizing recycling.I’ll leave this with the committee if you’re interested in making additional copies, that’s the reason I was late, I could only find one copy left I think I distributed most of the copies to the solid waste committee a couple years ago.I’ll leave this here with the committee that’s something to consider. Was E-waste also on the agenda? MS. O’HARA: Yeah. Yes it is. MR. BUKLAREWICZ: Okay, just to bring you up to date on what’s happening with electronic waste recycling, about 8 years ago another trend to keep electronic waste out of landfills because e-waste consists of nickel, cadmium, lead,mercury, all kinds of toxic materials that if allowed to go into the landfill getting busted up by the heavy equipment there. These types of toxic chemicals do leak into the ground water especially in unlined landfills like we have over here in Hilo so we made a pretty big effort to start collecting e-waste, this is back in 2004when Eileen was recycling coordinator, we brought in a grant from Dell, facilitated what we did for about three years by annual collections, one in Hilo, one in Kona. We would have special collection days for computers and peripherals and other types of e-waste. That went on for about three years. We also collected about 50 tons of e-waste as a result of the 2006 earthquake over in the Kohala coast. We also did a big drive that cleaned out a lot of the e- waste that was collecting in county buildings, state offices, schools and other federal and state office buildings, maybe about 35 tons. So in that first three years we kept about 500 tons of e- waste out of the landfills. We decided well there’s really a steady stream of this stuff that we should make a more continuous effort to try keep this stuff out of the landfills. So we opened up a couple of drop off depots, one in Hilo and one in Kona. Just to give you an example in calendar year 2009 we shipped 87, 40 foot containers to California for recycling. January 1, 2010, new state legislation came into effect that put the onus on the original equipment manufacturers to pay for the end of life recycling of their products. So they had to register… In 2010 it was just computers and peripherals. So any company that wanted to sell their products here in the State of Hawai‘i would register $5000 fee and give a plan, how they’re going to deal with their recycling. Most of the 35 plus manufacturers opted for a mail back system where they would give their customers a sticky label, box up this equipment and send it to whatever recycler they designate as their recycler. It totally destroyed the efforts that we had set up as far th as the depots here in Hilo. Only about four container loads got shipped in 2010 after April 30. We were funded by the county to provide free residential e-waste collection right up until April 14