The city has hired a consultant to evaluate whether it should continue recycling tons of office paper each year, at a rapidly growing cost, or burn it at the garbage-to-energy plant.

Environmental services director Eric Takamura told City Council members this month that officials want to weigh the overall environmental and economic impact of both options. He expects to get the report from consultant R.W. Beck by April.

While recycling sounds better for the planet, he said, the issue is less clear-cut because recycling requires burning fossil fuel to ship the paper away.

Burning paper at the city's H-Power plant produces electricity that reduces the amount of fossil fuel needed to generate electricity through a conventional power plant, he said.

The city has been recycling office paper, cardboard, beverage containers and newspaper at municipal offices since 1990. In 2004, the council made recycling mandatory in city buildings.

In the early 1990s, the city earned money back from the recycled paper. In most years, the city collected more than 100 tons annually and earned thousands of dollars each year — topping out at $12,321 in revenue in 1995. But all the paper must be shipped out of state to recyclers, and the cost has risen.

Island Recycling Co. has been handling the city's recycled paper since 1990. And company president James Nutter said the cost of shipping has pushed up the price, as has the wildly fluctuating market for paper.

He said it costs him $1,600 to send a shipping container to the Philippines, while it costs a company in Los Angeles only $400, or a quarter of his price, to ship a container to the Philippines from California.

"Shipping prices keep escalating, so we keep paying more and more," Nutter said.

Jeff Mikulina, executive director of the Sierra Club Hawai'i chapter, said he's interested in looking at the recycle-versus-burn analysis when it's complete.

"We think recycling makes the most sense," he said. "Hopefully, we prevent more trees being cut down to make paper."

But Mikulina said he understands the city's effort to find an environmentally friendly solution that makes economic sense for taxpayers.

By taking the lead in paper recycling, city offices provide a recycling role model, he said. If the city is burning its paper, he worries that it could discourage residents from recycling.

Island Recycling's Nutter said the world market for paper has changed. When recycling first got started, city offices produced high-grade computer paper, which fed into dot-matrix printers, and fetched a price two or three times more than the current market pays.

Now, most offices use inkjet printers, which print onto single sheets of paper. It's more difficult to remove ink from this paper than with dot-matrix printers.

In addition, Nutter said that paper prices change dramatically based on supply and demand, which makes them a moving target that's hard to budget.

He questions whether the city is analyzing all the costs. "They'd incur costs to pick it up, take it out to Kapolei and burn it," Nutter said. "I'd make you a bet that our charge is still cheaper," he said.

Nutter said H-Power already is running at capacity, so if the city starts sending paper there, it would need to send some other refuse to the landfill or pay to dispose of it another way.

In a report to the council, the Department of Environmental Services said the city appears to be recycling about half of its office paper. But spokesman Ken Kawahara said it's hard to get a more precise idea of how much is recycled without paying someone to study it.

He said that's because some of the paper the city buys leaves the office in the form of letters, permits and reports and other paper is filed.

Councilman Gary Okino said he thinks doing a study is a good idea. "Burning, to me, is also recycling," he said.

But Okino can't ignore the economics "if we can burn it and generate more electricity that way and bring in more revenue."

While awaiting the Beck study, Kawahara said, the city is striving to increase the amount of paper recycled through reminders; continued education about what to put in recycling bins; and periodic building walk-throughs to offer suggestions.

"I was throwing a lot of blueprint paper in there but found it couldn't be recycled," Kawahara said.

City Council chairwoman Barbara Marshall said she's anxious to see the results of the analysis. "That was a real shocker for us to see how much it was costing us to recycle," she said.

Marshall said the report will look the issue from a worldwide view as well as that of an island economy. "Globally, I don't think there's any question, it's better to recycle it versus burn it," she said.

But with high shipping costs and limited resources, the city must look at whether burning might be best, she said.

"I think we really have to weigh recycling in the context of this island at this time," she said. "Everything that we recycle has to be shipped away."

Reach Robbie Dingeman at rdingeman@honoluluadvertiser.com.