Posted on: Thursday, November 20, 2003

EDITORIAL
Sand Island sewage plant a good solution

A planned sewage-to-fertilizer conversion facility at the Sand Island Wastewater Treatment Plant has raised concern within the Kalihi community, and for good reason.

Local residents, along with their City Council representative, Romy Cachola, want more information about what the plant will do and whether there will be any negative environmental impacts before going ahead.

While the concerns are legitimate, they should be balanced against the current situation at Sand Island, which by any measure is far worse than what is proposed.

The City Council is scheduled to vote on a shoreline management permit for the project on Dec. 3. But Cachola wants to hold off on the permit until a full environmental impact statement can be prepared.

That would delay creation of the facility by a year or more, a situation neither the Kalihi neighborhood or the city should have to accept.

Today, 25,000 tons per year of incompletely treated sewage sludge are trucked from the wastewater plant to local landfills. This cannot be allowed to continue.

In fact, the city is under threat of substantial fines from the Environmental Protection Agency if it does not come up with a suitable "beneficial use" solution to the sludge disposal problem.

That solution is a $34 million contract with an international "residuals management company" called Synagro. The company proposes to build a facility that would convert sludge into commercially viable organic fertilizer.

Company officials insist that the "state-of-the-art" process is completely odor-free and that the end-product is safe and 100 percent free of pathogens. Cachola says he is not persuaded this is so.

Despite Synagro's assurances, residents continue to worry. But delaying the plant to produce an expensive environmental impact statement will accomplish little. The plant has already been approved by a long list of federal and state regulatory bodies, including the EPA and the state Health Department. An EIS would do little more than replicate the work of those authorities.

A better solution would be to insist on an iron-clad compliance requirement in the Synagro contract, which is precisely what the city has put into place. If there are problems, the company faces fines and obligations to make fixes.

To ensure compliance takes place, the city should set up a compliance oversight committee with substantial membership from the surrounding community. This would ensure that compliance is monitored not just by bureaucrats downtown but by those most affected.

The bottom line is that the current situation is unacceptable environmentally, aesthetically and legally. The sooner a fix is made, the better.