FEEDING THE BEAST
Now that H-POWER churns out up to 10 percent of the island’s electricity using municipal waste as fuel, island residents are seeing trash in a new light. Given that we generate 30 percent more trash per person than the average American, waste-to-energy seems like a win-win. Municipal solid waste qualifies as a renewable energy source under Hawai‘i’s renewable portfolio standard and takes up a fraction of the space at the landfill after it’s incinerated at H-POWER. But burning through our resources is exactly why we have a surplus of trash in the first place.
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rior to hopping onboard the waste-to-energy train, Honolulu sent the majority of its trash to the landfill. The methane in landfill gas is 86 times more potent a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide from waste combustion, but landfilling is the most common form of waste disposal in the United States. Abundant land and cheap fossil fuels create little incentive to explore costly alternatives like incineration. The opposite is true in Honolulu, where energy prices are three times the national average and the municipal waste stream threatens to outpace available landfill space. Unlike cities on the mainland, we can’t schlep our trash to backcountry landfills in the Midwest once ours are filled to capacity. “H-POWER is an ideal facility for O‘ahu,” says Markus Owens, public information officer for the Department
of Environmental Services. “H-POWER is a form of recycling, turning nearly 800,000 tons of municipal solid waste, which would have normally gone to the landfill, into renewable energy. The city targets only municipal solid waste that is non-recyclable as well as combustible for H-POWER and adheres to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s recommendation of waste-management hierarchy.” Municipal solid waste qualifies as a renewable energy source under Hawai‘i’s renewable portfolio standard, but burning fossil fuels for energy isn’t renewable, no matter how you sort it. Although more than half of the municipal waste stream is comprised of organic matter, thousands of tons of plastic and other fossil fuel derivatives end up in the incinerator. The truth is, most plastics aren’t recycled due to the cost and logistics of sorting, processing and marketing the variety of plastics that enter waste stream, and only a third of the plastics that can be recycled on O‘ahu actually make it into the blue bin. Waste prevention is the EPA’s gold standard for sustainable waste management, followed by reuse, recycling, incineration and landfilling. Hawai‘i’s solid waste management law requires the counties to uphold the same priorities, but incineration has played an increasingly starring role in the City and County of Honolulu’s solid waste management program in recent years. H-POWER increased its annual capacity by 300,000
Photo: Kevin Whitton
The Honolulu Program of Waste Energy Recovery is fed up to 3,000 tons of municipal solid waste a day and still has room to spare. The island’s trash is trucked in to be weighed, dumped and bulldozed amid the clank and hum of intake conveyors working around the clock to funnel a steady flow of trash into the belly of the beast. Operated by Covanta Honolulu Resource Recovery Venture in a public-private partnership with the City and County of Honolulu, the 28-acre waste-to-energy facility known as H-POWER has incinerated more than 13 million tons of trash since beginning commercial operation at Campbell Industrial Park in 1990.
The Honolulu Program of Waste Energy Recovery added a third combustion unit in 2012, increasing its capacity to incinerate waste and generate electricity by 30 percent.
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