Honolulu Is Running Out of Options for its 650,000 Tons of Trash, So It’s Thinking About Shipping It Somewhere Else

Taking out the trash isn’t as easy as it looks. After you put it in bin for pickup, it needs to go somewhere. And in Honolulu, the city is scrambling because in just a few years, it won’t have a place to put the 650,000 tons of trash it generates per year—at least, not locally.

The solution: shipping the trash somewhere else.

A closing landfill. The city of Honolulu sends most municipal solid waste—which refers to the everyday items we use and then throw away, such as product packaging, clothing, food scraps, appliances, furniture, paint, and batteries—to H-Power, a waste-to-energy facility that incinerates the trash and uses the steam produced to generate electricity.

It then deposits the ash produced from the combustion process in the Waimanalo Gulch Sanitary Landfill, the city’s only landfill. But that landfill is scheduled to close in 2028.

According to local outlet Honolulu Civil Beat, the city is aiming to meet an end-of-year deadline to pick a new site for a landfill. Meeting that deadline won’t solve its problem, though.

Shipping trash somewhere for 10 years. Even if the city does decide on a new site for another landfill, getting the permits and the infrastructure ready to start receiving trash takes years. In Honolulu’s case, city officials estimate that the process will take 8 years, Honolulu Civil Beat reported, which means that the new landfill won’t be ready by the time the old one closes.

Facing this scenario, the city has put forward a request for information on options to ship the trash off the island. In the solicitation documents, Honolulu states that it’s seeking to ship municipal solid waste somewhere else for a period of 10 years.

City officials told the Honolulu Civil Beat that the RFI doesn’t bind the city to choosing that option, which means that they’re still exploring other options.

“That’s something we’re working hard on right now,” Roger Babcock, the person in charge of managing waste for Honolulu, said.

Not an isolated issue. Honolulu isn’t the only one with a landfill problem. Hong City has struggled with its trash problem for years. Back in 2017, the territory dumped 15,000 tons of trash out every day, which is the bigger than the size of the Brooklyn Bridge.

Experts have been predicting that Hong Kong’s landfills would run out of space for years, but it still has three landfills in operation. In June, the local government detailed its plans to drive trash to waste-to-energy facilities over the coming years. It also plans to “mobilize the entire community to practice waste reduction and waste separation.”

Offering rewards for recycling. As it turns out, this mobilization resulted in a unique program. In 2022, Hong Kong kicked off a trial where residents were given rewards for recycling.

Residents earned up to 50 points a day for recycling. The points could later be traded for rewards, such as a pack of noodles (150 points) or a two-pound bag of rice (1,000 points). A previous iteration of the program managed to collect 200 tons of food waste, which the city doesn’t want in landfills because it produces methane gas.

Hong Kong officials aren’t the only ones trying to tackle food waste. In South Korea, residents have to pay every time they throw away food or other waste. The measure has transformed its recycling culture. In the 1990s, the country only recycled 2.6% of its food waste. Today, it recycles more than 97%.

Image | MPCA Photos

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