Aloha Hualalai Homeowners, you might ask yourself: Why recycle?
Answer – Simple economics. Re-selling waste material is a much cheaper alternative to either landfilling or burning it. In addition, recycling saves energy, reduces water consumption, and prevents pollution and associated economic and ecological costs.
All developed countries have recycling programs, because recyclable material has a value and recycling creates markets to sell recovered material. Recycling keeps total waste costs and taxes lower.
Landfills cost big money to build, to operate, and to manage. Even when they “close” they continue to cost taxpayers money to meet EPA regulations, manage methane gas emissions, chemical fires, chemicals leaching into water tables and polluting nearby rivers and oceans. Most incinerator programs have dubious ROIs and have difficulty maintaining economical viability.
There are many recyclable materials that end up in the landfill as in this photo below. When this happens the materials that contain harmful chemicals leach into the ground and water and the organic materials emit methane gas that pollutes the air locally and globally.
The charts below show the annual revenues lost in the landfill and the twelve market categories of the discards in the County of Hawaii.
Please send your name and email address if you are interested in a live Trash Talk gathering during Spring Break to cathyron@me.com
See website below if you have not signed up for Hana Hou recycling yet.
Mahalo,
Cathy O’Neill – homeowner & Sarah Riznyk of HanaHouRecycling@gmail.com
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