Posted on: Thursday, April 1, 2004

EDITORIAL
Let's have grown-up discussion on landfill

We're not saying "not in my back yard," people insisted Tuesday night at a Kailua District Park hearing about the location of a new O'ahu landfill.

But it is a NIMBY issue. People don't want a new garbage landfill in their back yard — and who can blame them? The two landfills since filled in and retired in Kailua near the Kapa'a Quarry — the "Dump Road" — used to smell, attract flies and scruffy birds, and of course the rumble of a day-long procession of big 'opala trucks.

Now the same phenomena are the norm at the current landfill in Waimanalo Gulch, and Leeward residents from Kapolei to Makaha are just as unhappy about the reality as Kailua residents had been. Nor do they appreciate the fact that most of the other landfill options under discussion are on the Leeward Coast.

But now that we've released everyone from blame for bellyaching about an unpleasant prospect, let's take a deep breath and concede to each other that it will be many years, if ever, before O'ahu can get along without an operating landfill.

That means somebody has to bite the bullet. Some neighborhood will be the site of a landfill. Get used to the idea.

One reason for the continuing need for a landfill, of course, is that while we're all prone to get emotional about its location, very few of us are willing to cut back on our waste stream enough to reduce the urgency of finding new landfill capacity.

Nor are we amenable to the idea of a tax increase to hasten expansion of the H-Power plant or development of plasma arc technology that would vastly reduce solid-waste-disposal requirements.

In other words, we're willing to let another neighborhood — any other neighborhood but our own — absorb our enormous daily output of 'opala.

Again, there will be a landfill somewhere. The urgency of establishing it depends on our willingness either to reduce our rate of waste disposal or pay more to speed up development of technological alternatives to landfill.

Given scant evidence that either sort of willingness exists anywhere on our island, we can conclude that one neighborhood will have to be the site of the next landfill rather soon.

We already have a comparative study of the available sites, so let's locate it at what objectively is the best site.

And then — this is the grown-up part of the discussion — the rest of the island will be obliged to compensate that neighborhood for what all must acknowledge is a serious imposition. One neighborhood "loses," the rest gain. How can we share these equities?

New parks? New highways? New schools? The extreme vehemence of the arguments to keep a landfill out of our neighborhoods serves to indicate how generous the compensation should be.

Let's have an end to pointless quarreling, and get on with solving the problem.