When you toss a soda can, plastic bottle or old newspaper into a blue curbside recycling bin in Mililani or Hawai'i Kai, you've launched it on a journey that leads to a new life far from the Islands.

Plastics travel to Los Angeles. Aluminum heads for Alabama. Old newspapers and corrugated cardboard venture to China.

There, the materials become part of anything from clamshell containers to picnic tables to simply new aluminum cans.

Glass bottles get to stay on O'ahu, where they're crushed and used as aggregate for pipe bedding and asphalt.

It's all part of a new cycle of life for tons of waste that's diverted from the landfill.

"Each commodity is going off in a different direction and has a different story," said city recycling coordinator Suzanne Jones.

But the key is this: "Your waste material is now going to be used as a feed stock for some kind of remanufacturing or reuse," she said. "It's no longer a waste."

The city has collected more than 1,300 tons of mixed recyclables from November — when it launched the curbside recycling pilot program in Mililani and Hawai'i Kai — through most of March.

That's just a fraction of all the waste that's recycled islandwide every year, but the city expects to significantly expand that on Nov. 1, when curbside recycling is extended to about 40,000 more homes on the North Shore, most of Kailua and areas of East O'ahu, and ultimately to 160,000 homes islandwide in 2010.

That improvement will come at a price, though. Startup costs alone will amount to more than $23 million, according to city officials.

Critics say O'ahu should have had curbside recycling years ago, and that the planned rollout is too slow.

Still, the expansion of curbside recycling — following voter approval of a 2006 city charter amendment that added curbside recycling to the city's environmental duties — is one of the city's more substantial environmental initiatives in recent times.

And it comes as the island's only municipal landfill is nearing capacity and hundreds of thousands of tons of trash accumulate annually.

City officials say they must phase-in the program in part because communities adjusting to the system need adequate staff assistance and because the expansion is limited by the manufacturer's bin production capacity of 5,000 bins a week.

They also say the start-up for the program is easier to finance over a few years rather than in one budget year.

The additional costs of the program are predominantly from purchasing a total of about 260,000 recycling bins, which amounts to $23.4 million, the city said. That includes $8.7 million for the previous and current fiscal years and more than $6 million that's requested for the fiscal year that begins in July. The bins are expected to last 10 years.

On top of that, there are operational costs covered by contracts with local private companies to handle the green waste and recyclables. The city currently pays RRR Recycling Services $19.75 per ton of mixed recyclables for the pilot program under a one-year contract that ends this year.

The city also pays private contractor Hawaiian Earth Products about $50 per ton for recycling green waste.

THE JOURNEY BEGINS

Mixed recyclables collected from blue bins in Mililani and Hawai'i Kai are brought to city contractor RRR Recycling Services' facility at Campbell Industrial Park. There the recyclables — from newspaper and plastic milk jugs to water bottles and aluminum cans — are loaded on an elevated conveyer and sorted manually by about six to eight workers armed with safety gloves.

Newspapers, which make up the majority of the recyclables, and cardboard are sorted first, with most of the workers grabbing handfuls of the materials off the conveyer and dumping them into containers.

A magnet pulls out a relatively small amount of bimetal material — tin and steel cans are not on the city's list of curbside recyclables — which is sent to a metal recycler, said Dominic Henriques, who runs RRR Recycling Services, a division of Rolloffs Hawaii.

The remaining recyclables continue along the conveyer where a worker picks out plastics and another worker picks out aluminum. Glass bottles and jars fall off the end of the conveyer into a bin.

"It's real constant," sorter and supervisor Harry Kupihea said of the job. "It's dusty, dirty, loud."

Workers also pull out pieces of trash that wind up among the recyclables, from dirty diapers and days-old smelly food scraps to even car engine parts.

"We get all kinds of stuff," Kupihea said. "I'm not surprised with anything. I can't even mention some of the things."

Kupihea and others say the amount of trash and green waste that ends up in what is supposed to be the recycle bin is relatively small. The city said unacceptable materials make up less than 4 percent of what's collected in the blue bins.

HI-5¢ plastic and aluminum beverage containers are also sorted out and weighed, with the city receiving the 5-cent deposit, Henriques said.

HI-5¢ deposits to the city from November through January totaled more than $34,000, RRR said.

After materials are sorted, they're baled and shipped to the Mainland or China to be made into new products, except for glass, which RRR recently began processing here, Henriques said.

TOWARD A NEW LIFE

Recyclable plastics go through several steps at Mainland reclaiming facilities. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, scrap plastics are passed across a shaker screen to remove trash and dirt before being washed and ground into small flakes. A flotation tank separates contaminants, and then flakes are dried, melted, filtered and formed into pellets. Product manufacturing plants use these pellets for new plastic products, the EPA said.

Henriques said the plastics with No. 1 plastic codes, such as beverage containers, are made into products like clamshell packaging. He said No. 2 plastics, like milk jugs and laundry detergent bottles, are made into various kinds of containers and buckets.

There are also other markets for plastics. According to the EPA, the main market for recycled No. 1 plastics, also called polyethylene terephthalate or PET, is fiber for carpet and textiles. Recovered No. 2 plastics — high-density polyethylene or HDPE — can be made into products like lawn chairs, bottles and picnic tables.

Newspaper is reused primarily for newsprint, and cardboard is manufactured back into various kinds of cardboard, depending on how strong the fibers are, Henriques said.

Most recycled aluminum beverage containers are manufactured back into aluminum cans, the EPA said.

Hawaiian Earth Products converts yard trimmings into products such as soil conditioner for sale locally. People can also pick up mulch — ground-up trimmings — for free.

The city in November began its curbside recycling program with 12,000 households in Mililani and 8,000 households in Hawai'i Kai.

The next neighborhoods to get it are Mokule'ia to Sunset Beach on the North Shore; Kailua and Lanikai; and East O'ahu, from Kuli'ou'ou to Manoa and Kapahulu.

More homes will be added through 2010, when all 160,000 O'ahu homes that currently receive automated trash pick-up are scheduled to be converted to the three-bin curbside recycling system.

MAKING MORE WASTE

Curbside recycling has long been a practice in many cities on the Mainland.

According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, about 8,660 curbside programs were operating across the country by 2006.

Curbside recycling programs began sprouting up in Oregon in the late 1970s and early '80s. A state law in the mid-1980s required monthly curbside recycling in cities of more than 4,000, and most Oregon cities now provide weekly or biweekly service.

Washington's state Legislature adopted a law in 1985 to create residential curbside recycling programs in every county. Communities in California started operating curbside recycling programs in the early 1990s.

Jeff Mikulina, director of the Sierra Club Hawai'i Chapter, called the city's plans "an incredibly slow roll-out."

"Relatively speaking, this is a pretty small island, and certainly there are always bureaucratic hurdles to get over," he said. "But you would think there would be some economies of scale that you could realize by doing it all at once."

Mikulina also said curbside recycling is only part of the equation and that reducing how much we throw away in the first place is also critical.

Residential waste has grown about 30 percent from 1999 to 2006, according to a study commissioned by the city.

"We're producing more waste per household than we ever have, and that continues to increase," Mikulina said.