Oahu still lacks broad strategy for handling trash
It's hard to forget that we live on an island. Some of the reminders — days spent on beaches, views of the Pacific on any day — are even pleasant.
But the realization of our remoteness, of limited land resources is not so welcome.
One stark, expensive reminder will come in the next weeks and months as the city receives and evaluates bids on a contract to ship 100,000 tons of O'ahu trash to a landfill in Roosevelt, Wash. That's expected to cost up to $7.5 million a year.
The fact that the tipping fees make this profitable for out-of-state landfills is fortunate; the city's back is against a wall, with no other alternative solutions to deal with the immediate crisis.
As it is, the city's long-term failure to deal with its solid-waste burden has forced an eleventh-hour extension of the Waimanalo Gulch Landfill permit and expansion into 92.5 additional acres in the Leeward Coast location.
West O'ahu residents are right to feel put out after trusting that a replacement landfill would have been secured by now. It does seem that the city has operated in perpetual crisis mode where managing municipal waste is concerned.
That culture is changing, thankfully, though the question remains: Is it changing fast enough?
This timetable is excruciatingly slow, especially considering that the plan would provide needed context for the immediate decisions on trash shipment and landfill expansion as well as the longer-range question: When will another site be needed?
O'ahu residents can't afford to wait any longer for what should have been an established service for an island community years ago.
Looking ahead, however, Honolulu residents and elected officials need to pull out all the stops in finding multiple ways of reducing the waste stream.
The city is now adding locations of recycling containers at schools and parks, which is an encouraging development.
But this should be a campaign embraced by private companies as well as government agencies, with more opportunities to divert trash from the landfill identified.
The exporting of our island's trash is a viable one, but it can't stand alone as a coping strategy. The goal should be to make this island responsible for handling its own waste. Relying on distant landfill space is expensive, and it will teach us nothing about responsible island living.
