2011-04-08 Cost of Government Commission Minutes

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MS. O’HARA: 23 million was it? MR. BUKLAREWICZ: Two million, three hundred thousand pounds right up until April of last year when the contract was finished. MS. O’HARA: Yeah. MS. NICHOLSON: So right now the county gives their stuff to DEM who takes it to these depots which the county doesn’t pay for or is there a current cost to the county for storing all of this e-waste that the county is generating oris it just somebody’s paying for that somewhere? MR. TAKABA: I’m not sure. I think we’ve been having drives at Aupuni Center. The county we take it over there but it’s not something that we put on it’s more of a private concern. MR. BUKLAREWICZ: That was our program. That was our annual/biannual program. MS. O’HARA: That was the program the county was paying for. The county was paying for the shipping. MR. TAKABA: So we would have done it that way. MS. O’HARA: We did it that way but what Paul has told us is that because of the passage of the state legislation which is a bit Oahu centric DEM has stopped funding, the county has stopped funding the e-waste program so he still has county guys coming to drop off e-waste at the depot because the information has not trickled down that the county is no longer supporting the program. They can’t afford to do it, there is no money to be made in recycling e-waste off of this island, it’s simply a cost. Do we bear the cost of filling up our landfill with this stuff or do we bear the cost of shipping it off island? This is why I decided to put on the topic pay as you throw because this is an underlined issue with recycling on this island, you cannot encourage people to recycle when you give them free disposal. There is no way to incentivize recycling. If we all had to pay as we throw and the stats are 85% of residential homeowners here on this island self haul their garbage to one of our 21 transfer stations. Now those transfer stations are supposed to accept all residential garbage for free but we also are taking in a considerable amount of commercial garbage for free. Surveys done at the transfer station indicate 30%-35% of the usage is by commercial businesses self hauling their trash to our residential transfer stations and getting free garbage. They do not haul it to the landfill. So we are bypassing a considerable amount of fees right there and if everyone had to pay to ditch a bag into the transfer station be it a dollar or two dollars the incentive to pull out all the recyclables would be much, much greater. Everywhere I’ve ever lived you had to pay to have your garbage either hauled away or taken to a dump or transfer station so if we were to do a pay as you throw system we would be creating the funding that’s needed to support these types of programs. It is always going to be an expense to get e-waste off of this island. We will never have the volume on the big island in order to justify a recycling business. They’re huge, I’ve visited these types of businesses on the mainland and they bring in a tremendous volume and they in two minutes will completely dismantle a computer and a monitor. They de-lead the glass, they take all of the contaminants out, the copper goes in this box, different metals in different boxes, the white plastic is separate from the black plastic and then it all gets pushed back into production as a material stream, it is no longer waste. It is a material stream used for new production. So you have to have huge volume to justify businesses like that plus California 17