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The Honolulu Advertiser

Posted on: Friday, January 24, 2003

'Aggressive' trash plan pledged

By Catherine E. Toth
Advertiser Central O'ahu Writer

As expected, the city has begun preparations for a 15-acre expansion and five-year extension of the Waimanalo Gulch landfill, another temporary fix to deal with O'ahu's increasing volume of garbage.

Last fall, with just weeks of capacity remaining at the landfill, the city received approval to raise the height of the waste pile. That action bought only about eight months of space, officials said.

The city issued its final environmental impact statement recently regarding the expansion. Approval of the expansion is seen as a foregone conclusion, because the city has no other alternative.

Critics have blamed the landfill crisis on the city's failure to look at disposal alternatives earlier.

Yesterday, Ben Lee, city managing director, vowed to launch an aggressive campaign to find alternatives to landfills, including new technology to turn waste into fuel, and expanding recycling programs.

The city's goal is to not place any municipal solid waste in the landfill in the next five years, he said.

"We will be very, very aggressive in exploring new technology and waste-to-energy alternatives to take care of municipal solid waste," said Lee.

One of the city's proposals is to use plasma torch technology, which uses electrical energy to reduce waste to road material — "glassphalt" — and gases. But Lee was unable to provide cost figures or other details on how the goal might be accomplished.

Some observers believe the city's goal is too lofty.

"We'd love to see other technology like that to reduce waste in a clean manner with reusable byproducts," said Sierra Club-Hawai'i director Jeff Mikulina. "But I don't think it's out there."

"The root of the problem really comes back to individuals," Mikulina said. "We have to reduce the amount of waste we produce and look at reuse and recycling. There's a lot more we can do."

Garbage on O'ahu mounts by 3,000 tons per day, aggravated by Hawai'i's service-based economy, which produces lots of trash.

Currently, the city uses H-Power to convert garbage to ash and produce electricity. The plant burns about 2,000 tons of garbage a day. The city gets about $26 million from Hawaiian Electric for the energy H-Power creates, Lee said.

The landfill receives about 800 tons of municipal solid waste and 600 tons of ash daily.

The city is already looking at plasma torch technology, which burns material at an extremely high temperature, turning it into pulverized glass. That glass can be used in road reconstruction.

A byproduct of plasma torch technology is synthesized gas, which can be sold as energy.

"It shows great promise," said Lee, who is encouraging City Council members to visit the only two plants in the world — in Yoshii and Sapporo, Japan — that use the process to dispose of municipal solid waste. The technology was developed by NASA to destroy waste from space.

Lee said he hopes that the state Department of Health will approve the city's request to replace crushed gravel with the ash created by H-Power as base material in reconstructing roads.

The Health Department has rejected the idea for years, concerned about traces of heavy metals in the ash. No study has been done to prove the existence of a dangerous level of heavy metals, Lee said.

The city also wants to expand its recycling program, which Lee called "very successful."

Lee said O'ahu recycles about 30 percent of its waste.

What the city does not want to do is build more landfills, Lee said. However, officials have said that even if satisfactory alternative waste removal can be found in five years, O'ahu will likely always need a landfill.

"We hope that over the next three or four years we will be able to determine if we can meet our goal of not looking for more landfills," Lee said.

Reach Catherine E. Toth at 525-8103 or ctoth@honoluluadvertiser.com.