Kaua'i recycling center 10 years in the making
By Jan TenBruggencate
Advertiser Kaua'i Bureau
LIHU'E, Kaua'i — The long-delayed opening of the Kaua'i Resource Center as a recycling drop-off site will provide residents and businesses with a place to take items that have not been easy to recycle.
When the recycling center opens April 20, it will be the end of a long and painful process.
Shortly after Hurricane Iniki in 1992, the center was envisioned as a place where old windows, doors, bathtubs and pieces of furniture could be brought, repaired and sold at reasonable prices.
With a large portion of the island's housing damaged in the storm, there was a lot of that kind of material then.
There isn't now.
The center, next to the Lihu'e Refuse Transfer Station, was built for $2.2 million in federal economic development money. It was designed to help restore the island's hurricane-damaged economy and divert material from the county's fast-filling landfill.
But in the late 1990s, when the county began looking for individuals, nonprofits or companies to run the center, it found few takers. The facility once known as the Kaua'i Resource Exchange and Buyback Center was changed in focus.
Even the proposal to use it as a recyclable drop-off site that accepts recyclables not now collected on the island drew only two bidders. The only one offering to pay rent, Island Recycling of O'ahu, will give the county $800 a month for use of about 60 percent of the recycling center, said Allison Fraley, county recycling coordinator.
The remaining space will be used for county recycling program offices, a recycling library and other related functions. Another firm, JC Sandblasting, will accept glass for recycling at the site.
Island Recycling will take No. 1 and No. 2 plastic, cardboard, mixed paper, newspaper and aluminum. It will also take pallets, tires, metals other than iron and electronic scrap like computer monitors, but may charge a fee to handle some of these.
"We see them coming in as a huge value to the county in terms of diversion from the landfill," Fraley said.
Some members of the County Council said last week they fear the center will compete with other recyclers on the island, and some said they worry that the $800 rent arrangement represents a county subsidy of the recycler because it is less than the fair-market rate for similar space elsewhere.
Speaking at a council meeting Thursday, former Councilman John Barretto, one of the island's first recycling business owners, said it is not a high-profit business and should have county support: "If you want to do recycling, you've got to support business," he said.
The county already supports six recycling drop-off sites that are handled by Garden Island Disposal.
Fraley said those sites accept only certain recyclables, and they are only for residential drop-offs. Island Recycling also takes recyclables from businesses.
