2011-04-08 Cost of Government Commission Minutes

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backed up with overflowing e-waste warehouses and hopefully it’s not going to wind up in a landfill. MS. NICHOLSON: So where are you with working with the county and does the county actually maybe Bill knows this, does the county generate a whole lot of e-waste and what do you do with it? MR. TAKABA: We give it to Environmental Management. MS. NICHOLSON: So it ends up in the landfill or warehouse somewhere? MR. BUKLAREWICZ: Actually they’ve been bringing it to the depots. MS. O’HARA: They’ve been bringing it to the depots and he is having to refuse it because they’re not funding the program anymore since 2004 when we started this program at the county. MS. NICHOLSON: And that was grant funded so… MS. O’HARA: No, just the first collection. I wrote a grant to Dell to get this kicked off and it was a one day event. We cleaned out quite a bit of the ground floor of the old county building which was full of old, old Wang computers stacked to the ceiling. There was just almost no space down there so when the county realized a) you can get a certificate of destruction by recycling and b) you get more space to use for other storage, they got onboard with it and they started funding it through contract hired to Recycle Hawai‘i to do this program. Recycle Hawai‘i morphed from event days to having these depots because it’s an ongoing problem and the county and state agencies around have gotten used to going and dropping off their computers at these depots. What Paulis saying is they can’t afford to ship them out because of the new legislation it basically only covers shipping from Oahu so they’re not able to cover it and… MS. NICHOLSON: I’m trying to figure out where Cost of Government might fit into this whole thing. MS. O’HARA: The thing is that you have to understand what the cost is to the government to not deal with this if this stuff goes into the landfill. We are fighting time here at the Hilo landfill. Not only does this stuff produce contaminants and we have an unlined landfill thank you, it’s also a matter of volume and so if we are not diverting material from this landfill we are forcing ourselves into the construction of a new landfill or some kind of mechanism to deal with our trash, which is a huge expense to the county. The longer we can defer that, the more we can recycle and keep out of the landfill, the longer we can defer that huge capital cost. Unfortunately because it’s hard to put this into a this is how much it would cost us to do this and this is how much it costs us to do that, we tend to ignore this problem. We could come down and put dollars on how much that diversion is worth to the county but that’s really the issue we are looking at here. MR. BUKLAREWICZ: Right up until the time the program was unfunded we diverted over two million pounds of e-waste from the landfill so that’s 1,500 tons or something like that. About the weight of a displacement of a Navy destroyer I would think in terms of weight and space in the landfill. So that is calculatedas saved space in the landfill. 16