VOLCANIC ASH

By David Shapiro

I became an unwilling host this week to a shiny blue recycling cart dumped in my driveway by the City and County of Honolulu.

It's not that I'm against curbside recycling to reduce dependence on landfills, just that there won't actually be recycling pickups any time soon while the city slugs out details with the United Public Workers.

Meanwhile, waste managers are parking these useless dumpsters in our yards to make the storage problem ours instead of theirs.

Mine sits near another bin overflowing with soda cans from the state's scheme to charge a nickel deposit to recycle beverage containers, while foot-dragging on redemption centers where we can get our money back.

The only recycling going on here is the stomach acid reflux when I contemplate expanding my carport to make more room for trash bins.

It used to be that local government was content simply to be ineffectual; now, our leaders insist on planting visible reminders of their ineptitude in our driveways for us to shake our heads at daily.

These burdensome "solutions" to the same problem reflect government bungling at its worst.

The city's curbside recycling has been endlessly delayed by squabbling between the mayor and the City Council — and now the union.

The state's "bottle bill" was enacted two years ago, but orderly implementation was frustrated by ongoing disputes between the Legislature that passed the measure and the governor who opposed it.

In the confusion, there has been little effort to mesh city and state efforts and avoid duplication.

If the city is encouraging us to leave beverage containers at the curb for recycling, why must the state stick us with a deposit to recycle the same containers?

It amounts to a new state tax, imposing a 1-cent nonrefundable fee for administration in addition to the 5-cent deposit on each container.

At a recent supermarket sale price of about 30 cents for a can of soda, the penny recycling fee amounts to a 3.3-percent tax on top of the 4.17-percent excise tax we already pay.

Consumers who forfeit deposits to avoid redemption centers and take advantage of more convenient city pickups pay an additional 16.5-percent tax on a 30-cent soda, potentially yielding the state millions of dollars in windfall profits.

The state's recycling tax essentially punishes us for choosing to recycle through a comparable city program that we also pay taxes on.

It's the kind of "sin tax" usually reserved for vices like smoking and gas guzzling. Naturally, hard liquor and wine bottles are exempt from the recycling law.

Both programs are models of how not to be customer-friendly.

The state requires us to clean, bag and store beverage containers, which we can't crush to reduce bulk, and then haul them to redemption centers to be tediously counted.

Between the consumer, the retailer, the distributor, the redemption center and the state, the nickel deposit will change hands a half-dozen times.

How about we return 12 empty cans to the retailer when we buy a new 12-pack, and no money changes hands?

The city warns that if inspectors catch us filling our gray garbage bins with more than 10-percent recyclables instead of using the blue carts, trash service can be discontinued.

Are they going to camp out in our driveways, rip open our garbage bags and weigh the refuse? Does it bother anybody else to have agents of the government picking through our rubbish?

I suggest these city inspectors do something more productive with that time — like take my soda cans to the state redemption center and bring me back my money.

David Shapiro can be reached by email at dave@volcanicash.net.