Tale of Two Cities: Naples, Italy, once famous for its breathtaking beauty, has become infamous of late for its trash, which is breathtaking in an altogether different sense. In March, tests confirmed that the water-buffalo mozzarella produced in dairies outside of Naples contained levels of dioxin above what is allowed by European health regulations. Dairy owners complained that illegal nightly burning of trash in fields near their pastures was responsible for the problem.
Although the more prosperous areas of Naples are clean, trash has been accumulating in poorer suburbs for months, to the point that the newly elected leader of Italy, Silvio Berlusconi, has announced he will personally oversee measures taken to resolve the problem.
But not all Italian cities share Naples’ problems. Montagnana, a small town in the Veneto region whose medieval walls are still intact, received the Italian Environmental League’s award for best recycling program last year. The city government there publishes a calendar, letting residents know what types of trash will be collected on each day of the week. Wet trash (kitchen waste) is collected twice weekly; green waste, paper, plastics, and glass are collected once a week. Bulky waste is picked up once a month.
No large collection bins, no dumpsters, not even big black bags line the streets. Instead, residents simply place their recyclables into small plastic bags, set them out on the street, and the town hauls them away. According to residents, the recyclables are taken to Germany for further processing.
Early Detection Setback: Bishop Museum has the largest herbarium in Hawai`i and its weed experts and botanists are as good as any elsewhere in the state. And so it seemed only natural that, when the state Department of Land and Natural Resources wanted to support a project for early detection of invasive plant species on O`ahu that Bishop Museum had already begun working on, it would turn to the museum for help.
So when Mindy Wilkinson, invasive species coordinator for the DLNR’s Division of Forestry and Wildlife, prepared the paperwork needed to clear the way for a sole-source contract with the museum, she provided extensive justification.
“The O`ahu Early Detection program,” she wrote, “seeks to find plants that may become economic, environmental or agricultural threats before they ‘jump the fenceline.’ The program requires botanical experts to be familiar with the thousands of plant species occurring on O`ahu and be able to recognize a new species. In order to carry out the program with scientifically accepted principles, an herbarium that has specimens of all known O`ahu species is required.”
Bishop Museum, which had been conducting the early detection program since its inception in 2006, was uniquely qualified for the contract, Wilkinson wrote; without its “records and resources,” identification of new plants would simply be impossible.
The justification was far longer than that for many other requests filed with the procurement office and the cost, $107,145, was far below that for many requests that receive routine approval. Still, on February 25, Aaron S. Fujioka, chief procurement officer, disapproved it. “This request does not sufficiently provide justification to meet” the legal requirements for sole-source awards, he determined, finding it did not describe “how this vendor is uniquely qualified and has been determined to be the only provider of these services.”
According to Wilkinson, the bureaucrat at the Department of Accounting and General Services who was handling her request insisted that “it was not vital that this work be done in Hawai`i,” and that she could and should expand her review of potential contractors to include other institutions, such as the Smithsonian, that could conduct the work.
“I tried to explain that if you’re trying to identify things in Hawai`i and respond to them quickly, the response time of 18 months to two years that’s typical is non-optimal,” Wilkinson said. DAGS, she added, “is strange and ridiculous.”
Still, the work is moving forward. The two botanical technicians who were working for Bishop Museum will continue to work on the same project, but now as employees under contract to the Research Corporation of the University of Hawai`i. “They’ll become part of the O`ahu Invasive Species Project,” Wilkinson said.
— Patricia Tummons
Volume 18, Number 11 May 2008
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