Members of about 160,000 Oahu households sort their discards for Honolulu鈥檚聽curbside collection program: gray bins for landfill garbage, blue bins for recyclables and green bins for yard waste.
The city would save millions of dollars, though, if it nixed the blue bins full of glass, plastic and cardboard and instead incinerated the material at the waste-to-energy plant, H-POWER, according to a city audit of the聽Department of Environmental Services recycling branch.
At H-POWER, trash is burned and converted to electricity, which is then sold to聽Hawaii Electric Company.
The audit, conducted by the聽Office of the City Auditor, found that while recycling diverts trash from landfills, the cost to collect, sort and ship the material is increasing while the market value for recyclables is decreasing.
After the city collects recyclables, it is sorted at a facility in Kapolei and sold to companies in China or on the mainland. Recyclable material made up 35.6 percent of the 1.2 million tons of trash Oahu residents and businesses produced last year.
The city receives a portion of the profits, if there are profits.
In fiscal years 2015 and 2016, the city spent about $3 million per year to process recyclables, but made just $767,000 and $997,000 respectively.
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