More than 30 tons of compacted washers, dryers, stoves and other appliances were removed by state workers Saturday from a city site in Waipahu. Crews took three trailers full of the crushed material to the Waimanalo Gulch Landfill, which is close to capacity.

The state is looking into whether the city is responsible for the illegal dumping, as the city stockpiled these items between January and November 2001, when it was negotiating its contract with scrapmetal recyclers.

The illegal dump site also included construction material, with evidence suggesting that dumping occurred after 2001, said Steve Chang, chief of the DOH's Solid and Hazardous Waste Branch, which is heading the investigation.

"The city claims people were dumping on its property; others claim city trucks came in and dumped it intentionally," Chang said. "We're trying to sort out exactly what happened."

The city is also conducting its own investigation, as the dumping took place on its property, a former incinerator site on Waipahu Depot Road now used by the Department of Environmental Services as a disposal operators site and base point for its Leeward fleet of trucks. A consultant has been hired to take samples of the soil and buried material.

Aside from the dumping, Chang is concerned that there might be an ulterior motive for burying the appliances instead of taking them to be recycled.

"What would the motive be to bury it on site?" Chang asked, noting that a recycler would have paid to receive the appliances.

During 2001 Hawaii Metal Recycling Co. asked the city to pay a tip fee of $36 per ton of scrap sent to its facility. At the time recycling companies had to pay the city $36 per ton of scrap — half the city's normal fee — to dispose of unrecyclable, nonmetal items, such as fabric from car seats and plastics from refrigerators, in the landfill.

Recyclers argued that they provided a service to the city — saving space in landfills as they compacted bulky items and recycled scrap metal — and warranted a reduced rate. The city, at the time, couldn't afford the tip fee and stopped sending its white goods to the recycling plant, Chang said.

Instead, it stockpiled the appliances at its Waipahu site.

Though the city and the recycling companies agreed at the end of 2001 to an 80 percent reduced rate — $14.40 per ton of scrap — to dispose of nonmetals in the landfill, the stockpiled material was never sent to HMR, the state's largest recycler.

"They claimed we rejected (the white goods) because they were dirty, but that's not an accurate statement," said James Banigan, general manager of HMR. "They were never rejected by us because they never came here."

In 2002 the city delivered about 167 tons of white goods to HMR, down from 1,700 tons in 2000, according to HMR. During negotiations in 2001, the city didn't take any white goods to HMR, the company said.

Last week Carroll Cox, president of EnviroWatch, an environmental watchdog group, discovered the dumping site, noticing that appliances were not just stockpiled but crushed and buried on site.

"This is a true hellhole in every sense of the word," Cox said. "There is nothing anyone can say to justify it. It's illegal across the board. Somebody should go to jail."

The improper burial of appliances could result in a fine of up to $10,000 per day from the time it was discovered, Chang said.

The state has given citations before for illegal dumping of buried white goods, but this is one of the largest dump sites, Chang said.

The city has said it would take "some responsibility for this" as it was found on its property, said Carol Costa, a city spokeswoman. "But whether there will be a fine or not is not known at this time."