Nothing can replace curbside recycling, supporters say.

While the city says it will step up other recycling efforts in the wake of its decision to indefinitely postpone the start of curbside pickups, none of the alternatives is likely to have the same impact, according to an environmentalist.

"Here's the bottom line: Three-quarters of the people couldn't care less about recycling unless it comes to them," said Jeff Mikulina, director of the Sierra Club Hawai'i chapter.

While Hawai'i has made great strides increasing recycling in recent years — most notably through the 5-cent refundable deposit on bottles and cans — an enormous amount of the state's solid waste still ends up in dwindling landfills, Mikulina said.

"It's disturbing that we're the largest city in the country without curbside recycling," Mikulina said. "We just don't have the luxury of being left out anymore."

Mayor Mufi Hannemann yesterday said the city remains committed to curbside recycling but that legal challenges could delay it until at least 2006. Given that, it didn't make sense to keep promising residents, thousands of whom already have received their blue recycling bins, that curbside recycling was coming soon.

That disappointed Liz Martinez, a Waimanalo worm farmer who said she has been ramping up her recycling efforts in anticipation of the curbside program.

"It's really discouraging to hear. People are ready for this, but the government generally has a degraded ability to move quickly on anything. It's like they are trying to please so many people that they end up disappointing everyone," she said.

Nationwide, there are almost 10,000 municipal curbside recycling programs, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Despite that and other successful recycling programs, household waste remains a constant concern with EPA officials because the overall tonnage generated continues to grow.

In Hawai'i, residents on average discard more waste than the rest of the country and are less likely to recycle, according to a legislative task force report released last year. Residents produce a per capita average of 6.2 pounds of solid waste per day, compared with 4.4 pounds nationwide. Meanwhile, 2002 figures showed Hawai'i's recycling rate for all counties at just more than 28 percent, less than the nationwide average of 34 percent.

That has helped contribute to a significant landfill crisis in Honolulu. Last year, the City Council voted 6-3 to extend the life of the city's only landfill, at Waimanalo Gulch, for five years despite strong objections from nearby residents. Council members said at the time they would seek ways to keep more solid waste out of the landfill, and curbside recycling was supposed to be a key part of that program.

"The new bottle law has been able to divert 300 million bottles and cans, but that's just one segment of the waste stream," Mikulina said. "Financial incentives work but there's still more to be done. What you see in areas with successful curbside recycling like Portland (Ore.) and Alameda in California is that they are able to capture more than 75 percent of all wastes.

"We were at the point where we had a company willing to pay the city to collect the waste, and now we're going to just drop it? You've got 10,000 other places doing it. Come on, we should be able to get over all the issues here, too."

Reach Mike Leidemann at mleidemann@honoluluadvertiser.com.