The City and County of Honolulu will on Monday begin delivering municipal solid waste to Hawaiian Waste Systems LLC for shipment to a disposal facility in the state of Washington.

“I am pleased progress has been made, and we are going to be delivering our first shipment of opala,” Mayor Mufi Hannemann said. “I want to make it clear that this is an interim program; we have never said that it is a permanent solution.”
Each week, approximately 2,080 tons of waste that would otherwise go to the Waimanalo Gulch Sanitary Landfill will be diverted to the Hawaiian Waste Systems’ facility in Campbell Industrial Park, where it will be processed and prepared for shipping.
The company was the low bidder for the project, and will charge the city $99.89 for each ton of waste it disposes of.
The Department of Environmental Services will provide Hawaiian Waste Systems with at least 100,000 tons of waste annually for the next three years, or until the planned third boiler is built and operational at H-POWER, the city-owned waste-to-energy facility.
“We’ve always said you don’t spend $302 million on a third boiler and then ship the municipal solid waste needed to fuel it,” Hannemann said. “When that third boiler is up and operational, we need to convert that waste to energy at H-POWER because that’s a green solution.”
The city will direct nonburnable and nonrecyclable materials to Hawaiian Waste Systems and will include other waste when H-POWER operations are temporarily suspended for routine maintenance.