No Want of Waste Bills, But Will Any of Them Pass?

posted in: February 1991 | 0

If the number of bills on a given subject were a gauge of legislators’ determination to deal with that issue, solid waste would be a sure candidate for action this year. Many of the bills deal with one small aspect of the problem, and while this may be better than nothing, it is no substitute for an overall, comprehensive approach to solid waste.

The Department of Health’s proposal for an integrated solid waste management act is an effort to provide this. On the whole, it represents an improvement over the myriad solid waste bills that confronted the Legislature last year. Because it has been subjected to the review of members of the state’s advisory task force on solid waste, the bill also represents the state’s best effort to address the frequently conflicting concerns raised by this body, whose members are drawn from a wide range of groups in both the public and private sectors.

The effort shows. The bill is not the forward-thinking, aggressive measure that is needed to carry the state into the 21st century. It promises, rather, to plant Hawai`i firmly in the early 1980s, when incineration was regarded as a reasonable component in waste management and when recycling was an afterthought designed to appease troubled consciences rather than a vitally important means of recovering valuable resources.

Not that this is a bad bill. Its passage would leave the state better off than it now is. It would set up a process by which the state could work cooperatively with the counties as the latter develop plans for reducing and managing solid waste. But the bill should do more. Here are a few suggestions.

First of all, the concept of “integrated” solid waste management is archaic. As defined in the bill, this term refers to “the complementary use of a variety of waste management practices and processing methods to safely and effectively manage solid waste with the least adverse impact on human health and the environment.” Those methods, listed in § -2(b), are, in order of priority, source reduction; recycling and bioconversion (a fancy word for composting, in the main); incineration “with energy recovery”; and landfilling and incineration without energy recovery. “The respective roles of landfilling and incineration shall be left to each county’s discretion,” the bill states.

The notion that incineration (with or without “energy recovery”) can peacefully coexist with recycling is not supported by logic or by economics. The sole reason for including incineration is, of course, Honolulu County’s ill-considered investment in H-POWER, the Campbell Industrial Park Moloch that demands the sacrifice of 2,000 tons per day of paper, plastics, cardboard, and other perfectly good, reusable resources. There is simply no way in which Honolulu can get serious about recycling or devise innovative waste reduction programs without jeopardizing H-POWER’s operation.

H-POWER is, unfortunately, a given. That does not mean that state law has to overlook Honolulu’s indiscretion. There is no good reason for encouraging or even allowing other counties to emulate Honolulu’s mistakes, as this bill implicitly does by its refusal to acknowledge the contradiction between incineration and recycling. The Legislature should be asked to eliminate incineration as a planning option for all counties that do not yet employ it. This would allow H-POWER to continue to be a part of Honolulu County’s solid waste management plan, but would assure residents of the other counties that Fasi’s Folly will not be replicated on their own islands.

Second, the goals the bills establishes for reducing “the solid waste stream” (25 percent by 1995 and 50 percent by 2000) are meaningless, since the “solid waste stream” is never defined. Does it include material that never enters the “stream” but is still recycled (for example, cardboard boxes from retailers; scrap metal; aluminum cans; paper from offices that recycle, etc.)? If so, the targets are going to be ridiculously easy to achieve simply by means of bookkeeping. If not, then what is to be the base line against which reductions are measured? Finally, what is to happen when (if) the latter goal is achieved? Does the state simply stop any further efforts to reduce waste and content itself with holding at the 50 percent level?

Third, the bill does little to spur the development of markets for recycled products and industries that will use recycled goods in the manufacturing process. It exhorts the Department of Business, Economic Development, and Tourism to work with the state Office of Solid Waste Management (within the Department of Health) to “coordinate state efforts to develop markets for recycled materials.” Given the pressing need that exists in this area, the bill’s failure to give greater emphasis to market development is lamentable.

Other omissions should be noted. Household hazardous waste is not addressed and the touchy (for business) issue of advance disposal fees is skirted. Counties are allowed to decide the matter of how they pay for their waste management plans. All in all, the bill allows both the public and the counties to avoid confronting the real costs of dealing with waste as waste, and in that sense it tilts the playing field toward those options (landfilling and incineration) that already enjoy huge but hidden taxpayer subsidies.

Our baseline assessment: The bill, from its title on down, would put the state on course toward “managing” solid waste. What is needed for the future, however, is “reducing” solid waste — getting rid of it, not by throwing it away, of course, but by eliminating the very concept of it. What we call waste is simply another term for a resource that we have decided we can afford to lose rather than keep. This attitude runs squarely into the environmental ethic of sustainability, in which no more is consumed than what can be replenished. In this day and age, there is no good reason why Hawai`i should be content with managing waste. The state should rise to the challenge of eliminating it.

Hazardous Waste

Several measures propose to deal with household hazardous wastes. Among the options are regular, if infrequent, collection programs in each county and advance disposal fees, to help finance the high costs of dealing with these wastes.

Also, once more a hazardous waste treatment facility is being proposed for the Barber’s Point area. However, until and unless Hawai`i starts generating far more hazardous waste than it does at present (an eventuality we hope never comes to pass), there is no way in which such a facility could be cost effective.

Getting the Lead Out

Readers of Mother Jones might recall a recent article, “Toxics ‘R Us,” describing in chilling detail what happens when scrap metals (including lead-acid batteries) are shipped to recycling facilities in the Third World. What the author, Dan Noyes, does not mention is that Hawai`i is one of the sources of the used batteries that pollute the land and poison the people of Taiwan and mainland China.

Not that the danger lies on foreign shores alone. Improper treatment of lead-acid batteries right here has resulted in pollution of Hawai`i’s own land and water.

These are the reasons behind the Department of Health’s proposed amendment to the law regulating lead-acid batteries. It would require lead-acid batteries either to be shipped to a secondary lead smelter operating under an Environmental Protection Agency permit, or to have the liquid electrolyte in the batteries neutralized before shipment to any secondary lead smelter. Strict record-keeping requirements would be established also, as well as stiff penalties.

What goes on at dump sites abroad is not a matter that is without impact on our own lives — morally, economically, environmentally. Passage of this one small bill in undiluted form is therefore terribly important.

Also to Consider

Solid waste is a serious enough issue to require passage of the sort of omnibus law the Department of Health has drafted. Until there is an overall and effective framework to deal with solid waste, however, piecemeal legislation, addressing one or another type of solid waste, recycling approach, or waste reduction method, will continue to proliferate each year. Among the bills introduced this year, for example, are the following: a ban on Mylar balloons; a ban on all packaging carry-out food in anything other than a biodegradable container; a ban on the state purchase of non-degradable food containers; targets for the use of recycled paper products in state offices; a ban on the state purchase of paper bleached with chlorine compounds (and, therefore, presumed to be contaminated by dioxin); and several variations on the theme of a beverage-container deposit law.

All of them have some merit, but even more, they speak to the need to set up a coherent waste-reduction policy.

Ashes, Ashes…

As expensive as H-POWER is (see the October 1990 issue of Environment Hawai`i), its economic feasibility nonetheless requires that it be operated in a way that is hit-or-miss when it comes to detecting hazardous levels of heavy metals and other toxic substances in the ash it produces. If Honolulu were required to monitor the ash continuously so that batches meeting or exceeding the threshold definition of hazardous waste, set by the federal government, would be dealt with appropriately, H-POWER’s costs would rise by several thousand dollars a month — a minuscule percentage of the $4.25 million it eats up anyway in a given month.

Senator Mary-Jane McMurdo has introduced a bill to require just this: that absent evidence (acquired through monitoring, sampling, testing and the like) to the contrary, incinerator ash shall be presumed hazardous and dealt with as such. If the City and County of Honolulu has been truthful in its claims that H-POWER’s ash falls below hazardous waste standards, the only cost will be proving it. If Honolulu is unwilling to do this much to reassure the public on H-POWER’s harmlessness, the public has every reason to be skeptical of those claims.

(McMurdo also proposes a ban on burning products made with chlorofluorocarbons in incinerators. In itself, it would be impossible to enforce, but if it were passed along with the bill, mentioned earlier, to ban sales of food in non-degradable containers, it might stand a chance of working.)

Volume 1, Number 8 February 1991

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