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The Honolulu Advertiser

Posted on: Wednesday, November 5, 2003

EDITORIAL
We're depending on you, Mililani

OK, Mililani. Take note. Because if you do this right, all of O'ahu, particularly residents of the Leeward Coast, will benefit.

We're talking about the city's pilot curbside recycling program, which starts this week.

By now, you should all have a gray and a green 96-gallon cart on wheels, though some of you have opted for just one cart.

In Australia and New Zealand, where curbside recycling is well established, they call the carts "wheelie bins." Perhaps we can too.

Today is green waste day for residents of central Mililani. Tomorrow, southwest Mililani gets its green waste picked up. And northeast Mililani and upper Mililani Mauka had theirs collected on Tuesday.

Next week, on that same schedule, you can put out mixed recyclables — that is, newspapers without glossy inserts and magazines, double-layer cardboard, aluminum cans, and glass and plastic bottles that have not held hazardous materials such as herbicides, pesticides or car fluids.

With any luck, you'll find that after a couple of months of recycling, you won't need two garbage pickups a week, and you'll volunteer to give up one. That means less trash going to the landfills, which is the ultimate goal here.

Moreover, if all the wrinkles in the four-month pilot program are ironed out and it really does keep trash out of the landfills and gets approval from the City Council, it could just keep going, and spread to the rest of O'ahu.

Or we can build more landfills around the island, possibly in someone's backyard, to accommodate a never-ending river of trash. It's up to you, Mililani.