Reycle.
It’s one of the easiest ways we can take care of our environment. Instead of tossing aluminum cans, glass bottles, plastic containers, cardboard and paper products into the trash, we can recycle it.
And, as we live on an island with limited landfill space, recycling is critical. It is a must. It shouldn’t be something we do some of the time. It’s something we should do every day. Nothing should go in the trash and be buried in a landfill if it can be used again. And the county should be pounding that point home and doing all it can to promote recycling.
Today is a good start.
The County of Kauai Solid Waste Division celebrates America Recycles Day today and encourages the public to participate at their homes, schools and workplaces to do their part to reduce, reuse, and recycle.
The county facilitates the following recycling programs the public may utilize:
• The Kauai Recycles drop bin program with eight locations around the island;
• eWaste recycling six days a week at the Puhi Metals Recycling Facility or once a month during mobile eWaste collections in Hanapepe and Kilauea;
• Free home composting bin distributions on Fridays at the Kauai Resource Center or the North Shore via Kauai Worms; and
• Home battery recycling.
Kauai’s landfill is nearing capacity with an estimated accumulation of 86,900 tons every year, and decision-making is ongoing on a new, $65-million facility for the island’s garbage.
The current waste diversion rate is around 40 percent, and the goal is to achieve 70 percent diversion by 2020.
According to previous TGI reports, a curbside residential recycling program helped for a while, but the cost became problematic, according to the county. The cost for the curbside recycling program was between $10 million and $20 million, including trucks and bins. Kauai was recapturing 63 tons of plastic per year through the Kauai Recycles Drop Bins as opposed to almost 400 tons per year of bottle plastics through the HI5 redemption program.
We are doing better, in America, when it comes to recycling. The recycling rate today is about 35 percent. Just 50 years ago, it was less than 10 percent. Of course, a problem being, we are producing far more waste today than we were 50 years ago.
When you consider that the United States generates an estimated 230 million tons of trash, that’s a lot of garbage going into the ground or being incinerated.
Unfortunately, many people don’t really care. If you happen to glance into a trash can at a public park, on the street, inside a business, odds are it contains cans, bottles, bags and paper — all of which could be recycled but won’t be.
Now, it’s not all our fault.
The recycling market isn’t great. In fact, economically, it’s down.
The Associated Press reported earlier last month that “America’s recycling industry is in the dumps.”
“It all stems from a policy shift by China, long the world’s leading recyclables buyer. At the beginning of the year it enacted an anti-pollution program that closed its doors to loads of waste paper, metals or plastic unless they’re 99.5 percent pure. That’s an unattainable standard at U.S. single-stream recycling processing plants designed to churn out bales of paper or plastic that are, at best, 97 percent free of contaminants such as foam cups and food waste,” the AP reported.
“The resulting glut of recyclables has caused prices to plummet from levels already depressed by other economic forces, including lower prices for oil, a key ingredient in plastics.
The three largest publicly traded residential waste-hauling and recycling companies in North America — Waste Management, Republic Services and Waste Connections — reported steep drops in recycling revenues in their second-quarter financial results. Houston-based Waste Management reported its average price for recyclables was down 43 percent from the previous year.
And mountains of glass are piling up around the country because no one knows what to do with all of it.
That said, we urge you to recycle. Once it’s buried, it’s buried forever.
Let’s take care of Earth by doing one of the easiest things there is — recycle.
