Mililani and Hawai'i Kai residents recycled 54 percent of their cans, bottles, plastic containers, newspapers and green waste during the city's six-month curbside recycling pilot project.

City officials said they were pleased with the results and are moving forward with the previously announced rollout of curbside recycling to most O'ahu homes by May 2010.

Instead of the current twice-weekly garbage pickup, homes will have garbage collected once, with recyclables or green waste collected on the second pickup day.

City officials have decided not to offer the option of twice weekly garbage collection for an extra fee. That option was tried in Mililani, but only a small fraction of residents used it, the city said.

These and other findings were in a study released by the city Department of Environmental Services this week.

The study predicted an islandwide curbside recycling program will divert an estimated 53,800 tons of mixed recyclables and green waste from O'ahu's waste stream. More than 412,000 tons of residential waste was collected in 2006.

The recycling report said the system worked well for most of the 18,500 Mililani and Hawai'i Kai households included in the pilot project, which began in November.

The city has said it plans to begin expanding curbside recycling to more communities in November, with the program ultimately reaching 160,000 homes islandwide in 2010.

City Council Planning and Sustainability Committee Chairman Gary Okino said he was happy with the results outlined in the report.

"I'm especially pleased to see that we can move ahead without offering that extra day of (garbage) pickup," Okino said, adding that it will rein in costs. "It's a good service that's going to be provided almost within the financial constraints that we have now."

The report said the estimated annual operating costs of a system including islandwide curbside recycling could be about $180,000 less than pre-curbside recycling operations because of reduced transfer costs, the elimination of manual green waste collection routes and recycling pickup displacing one weekly refuse pickup.

That does not include the start-up costs for an islandwide curbside recycling program, which the city said includes about $23.4 million for 260,000 recycling bins to be financed over a few years.

PROCESSING COST RISES

The city is paying Hawaiian Earth Products $50 per ton to process curbside collected green waste.

The city has been paying RRR Recycling Services $19.75 per ton to process mixed recyclables, but plans to increase that to $45 because RRR was not collecting as many higher-value recyclables as had been projected.

The city is credited 5 cents for each HI-5¢ container placed in the mixed recyclable bins and gets about 600 containers or $30 worth per ton. The city's net cost for processing recyclables will be about $15 per ton.

Based on recovery rates in the two communities, an islandwide curbside recycling program would collect about 27,000 tons of mixed recyclables and 48,000 tons of green waste, the city said. That makes up about 54 percent of the mixed recyclables and green waste generated by homes islandwide, according to the city. Those numbers could grow as the curbside recycling program matures, the city said.

Factoring in current curbside green waste pickups and the anticipated shift of some materials from community recycling bins to curbside bins, the city estimated the curbside recycling program would result in a net increase of 25,800 tons of mixed recyclables and 28,000 tons of green waste collected.

Hawai'i Kai and Mililani communities collected a total of 2,761 tons of green waste and 1,524 tons of mixed recyclables from November through April, according to the report.

Hawai'i Kai performed better than Mililani during the six-month evaluation period. For example, the average set-out rate for mixed recycling bins in Mililani was 41 percent, compared with 67 percent in Hawai'i Kai.

OTHER FINDINGS

Other findings outlined in the report include: