Oahu recycling update

The bad news from China took effect on New Year’s Day, 2018: Due to growth, development and a mounting pile of its own recyclable waste, the world’s second-largest economy was no longer in the market to buy America’s trash as raw materials.

Suddenly, U.S. cities — which had benefited from an easy way to make recycling pencil out, given that for decades, China had been happy to buy up 40-50 percent of the recyclable materials — now had to come up with other solutions.

While the islands face a particular problem given the added factor of shipping costs, Oahu is not alone: Philadelphia, for example, has begun sending half of its recyclables to the incinerator.

The alternative contemplated by the City and County of Honolulu is a variant of that, though in milder form. Noting the falling values of recyclable glass, aluminum and paper now being collected in the city’s curbside recycling program, the city auditor in 2017 proposed redirecting much of it.

The waste, recyclable or otherwise, could go to the garbage-to-energy plant, H-POWER, to reduce the volume of what otherwise is bound for the landfill, according to the audit. The numbers are hard to dispute. From a high in 2011 when the sales value of the collected materials topped $2.5 million annually, it has dropped by more than half — and continues to fall.

Regardless, the notion of abandoning the curbside recycling effort quickly drew opposition from environmental groups, including the Sierra Club. Jodi Malinoski, policy advocate for the Hawaii chapter, said the organization does not want to see the city continually feeding its garbage to the plant, even if harvesting energy from it is a partial offset.

“It seems like we have to keep the fire going,” she said. “It’s time to cut that out.”

Rather than curbing the recycling, Malinoski said environmentalists favor finding a way to cut costs by reducing waste overall and by manufacturing a product with recyclable materials on-island rather than shipping it elsewhere.

There may be a point at which the city and the environmental groups can meet in the middle, said the city’s environmental services chief, and that discussion is likely to happen over the next several months.

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WHAT’S SUPPOSED TO BE IN THE BINS?

>> Green bins contain the green waste. That’s largely yard clippings: grass and tree and hedge trimmings. But it also can include plain vegetable and fruit waste unmixed with other ingredients.

>> Blue bins contain the recyclables, which can all be mixed together. Paper products are limited to newspaper, corrugated cardboard and white or colored office paper. Paper should exclude glossy paper or inserts, clips, envelopes and sticky labels. Glass bottles and jars, aluminum cans, metal food cans and plastic containers of types 1 and 2 (look for the triangle with a 1 or 2 inside, usually embossed on the bottom of the container).

>> Gray bins contain the regular trash — everything else suitable for general disposal, excluding anything hazardous. These are items such as plastic bags, Styrofoam, junk mail, magazines, cereal boxes and other chipboard, food cans and plastic containers other than those coded No. 1 or No. 2.

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WHO GETS IT, AND WHERE DOES IT GO?

>> Green waste goes to Hawaiian Earth Recycling in Wahiawa, which processes it into mulch and soil amendments such as compost.

>> Mixed recyclables are screened, separated and packed for shipping at the RRR Recycling plant at Campbell Industrial Park. According to its website: Corrugated cardboard and newspaper are sent largely to Asia to be remade into more cardboard, brown paper bags, more newspaper, wrapping paper and molded packaging. Aluminum cans are shipped to the mainland to be reprocessed into new aluminum cans and other products; glass bottles may be crushed and used as construction backfill locally, but much of it is shipped to the mainland to be melted into new glass products; plastics are shipped to the mainland or Asia to be remanufactured.

>> Trash largely goes to H-POWER to be burned for the heat that drives electrical generators; what can’t be incinerated goes to the landfill.

How we stopped climate change (in 31 years)

we're unleashing our imagination and exploring a dream, a possible future in which we're bringing global warming to a halt. It's a world in which greenhouse emissions have ended.

Mass Electrification (Batteries Hold The Power)

(Editor's note: Each story has two sections, the first reflecting the present and the second imagining the world of 2050.)

2019: I went looking for people who've mapped out this world without greenhouse emissions. I found them in Silicon Valley. 

Sila Kiliccote is an engineer. The back deck of her house, high up in the hills, overlooks Cupertino. Apple's circular headquarters is hidden in the morning mist. It's a long way from Istanbul, in Turkey, where she grew up; a great place to conjure up future worlds.

"Maybe you'd like some coffee?" Kiliccote says.

Her coffee machine is powered by solar panels on the roof. So is her laptop and her Wi-Fi.

"Everything runs on electricity in this house," she says.

This is the foundation of a zero-carbon world: Electricity that comes from clean sources, mainly the sun and the wind, cheap and increasingly abundant.

Today, it powers this house; tomorrow, it could drive the world.

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2050: The first step was electric cars. That was actually pretty easy

"By 2025, battery technology got cheaper," she says. Electric cars were no longer more expensive. "At that point there was a massive shift to electric vehicles, because they were quieter, and cleaner, and [required] less maintenance. No oil change! Yippee! You know?"

Heating and cooling in homes and office buildings have gone electric, too. Gas-burning furnaces have been replaced with electric-power like heat pumps.

We needed more electricity to power all this right when we were shutting down power plants that burned coal and gas. It took a massive increase in power from solar and wind farms. They now cover millions of acres in the U.S., 10 times more land than they did in 2020. Huge electrical transmission lines share electricity between North and South America. Europe is connected to vast solar installations in the Sahara desert, which means that sub-Saharan Africa also has access to cheap power.

"It just changed Africa," Kiliccote says. "It actually fueled the economies of Africa."

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The Urbanization Of Everything (A Desire Named Streetcars)

2019: I'm taking a walk through downtown Toronto, in Canada, with Jennifer Keesmaat, the city's former chief planner.

Keesmaat wants me to see one particular street. King Street. It's the seed of a zero-carbon future, she says.

King Street has a little bit of everything: glass-walled office buildings, theaters, old brick warehouses.

Two years ago, a new set of traffic rules went into effect here. "Basically, what we've done is, we've limited through-traffic for cars," Keesmaat says. It forced cars away from King Street and launched a whole cascade of changes.

The streetcars that run down the middle of King Street weren't stuck in traffic anymore.


They became the best way to get across town at rush hour. "The volume of people being moved is astronomical!" Keesmaat says, as one rolls by. The streetcars, of course, are powered by electricity, and one passes every two or three minutes.

Meanwhile, thousands of people have been moving into this downtown neighborhood, buying condos and renting apartments. Keesmaat knows one of them. He's the father of one of her friends.

"He said to me a few weeks ago, he thinks he takes out his car about once every two weeks," Keesmaat says. He walks to shops, restaurants and basketball games. His neighbors walk to jobs in the financial district right down the street. He's not heating a big free-standing house, either.

He has cut his energy use, and his greenhouse emissions, dramatically.

"That wasn't the driver for him," Keesmaat says. "He didn't say, 'How do I in fact live smaller?" It just happened naturally in this new urban geography.

2050: At this point, Keesmaat and I open up our minds and take a leap into a world that could be. Greenhouse gas emissions have dropped to zero.

How did we do it? By gradually reshaping our cities so that they look more like this neighborhood, with lots of people living close together, within walking distance of many of the things they need.
Keesmaat can already see this city in her mind, and describe it. "The vast majority of streets have been pedestrianized; that's how people get around, by walking down the street," she says.

"What has happened to the sprawling suburbs?" I ask. "Are people living there? How are they getting around?"

"Some of the large homes haven't changed at all," Keesmaat says. They've just been turned into multifamily units." Other free-standing houses that once lined suburban cul-de-sacs have disappeared; each one has been replaced with a building that contains five or six homes. With the local population booming, those neighborhoods also attracted shops and offices. Suburban sprawl morphed into urban density.

Cars have mostly disappeared. "There are cars, but people don't own cars," Keesmaat says. "Because a car is something that you use occasionally when you need it." Streetcars and buses go practically everywhere in the city now, and you rarely have to wait more than a couple of minutes to catch one. Fast buses and trains connect towns. For other destinations, there's car-sharing.

And it wasn't just technology, Hoornweg says. Over the past three decades, from 2020 to 2050, a huge cultural shift has taken place.

Just one example: In Toronto, the sharing economy that started decades ago with Uber and Airbnb is everywhere now. "Sharing rides, sharing tools, sharing somebody to look after your dog when you're not there."

Yes, we apparently still have dogs in 2050.

In part, people are forced to share things; cars are scarce and homes are smaller. (Scores of home builders went belly-up in the 2030s when millions of people suddenly decided that big houses weren't just expensive; they were lonely, too.)

But the scale of zero-carbon life also makes it easier to share. We're living closer together and run into neighbors all the time. "We have more acquaintances — somebody we met in our ride pool or car pool or whatever," Hoornweg says. "There's no better way to [meet your neighbors] than sitting in a [shared] car and you can't get away from them for 20 minutes or whatever."

Some people hated losing their yards and their solitary commutes at first. Others loved the changes. Eventually, Hoornweg says, it just became normal. People stopped talking about it.

Life now goes on as it always did. But there's one huge difference. We're no longer heating up the planet.