Posted on: Monday, January 3, 2005

EDITORIAL
Make bottle drop-off time more convenient

Picture this: You've got a box full of cans and bottles in the trunk of your car and you want to drop it off at one of the certified statewide recycling centers to get back your nickel-a-container deposit.

But here on O'ahu — between work and bringing kids to and from school and other daily obligations — most of us don't have a whole lot of daylight hours to run errands.

So how about lunchtime? Oops. Most of the centers are closed between noon and 1 p.m.

Well, how about after work? Nope, that won't work either. Most are closed at 5 p.m.

Weekends? You're in luck. Most are open Saturdays from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., but only a few are open Sundays. And imagine the crowds and the refund lines on that one day.

You may be better off dumping your empty containers in your local school campus recycling container. You won't get a refund, but at least it's fast and painless.

Make no mistake. We want people to use the certified bottle redemption recycling centers. We want the bottle law to work so our beautiful landscape isn't littered with empty aluminum, glass and plastic containers.

But we don't want a drop-off system whose banker's hours keep the majority of customers away. We don't want to be stuck with an expensive, inconvenient boondoggle.

With an average 800 million beverage containers (50,000 tons) sold in Hawai'i each year, we know that containers are a huge part of our waste stream.

But the fact is, the 5¢ refund is not enough to make most people spend their Saturdays waiting in long lines at a redemption center. So let's change or extend the hours to evenings and weekends. Wide public participation is what's going to make this program work.