As the big front-end loader approached my borrowed trailer with a full scoop I expected the operator to carefully dump just enough for a load. No… he dumped it all. The trailer disappeared in a cloud of dust and an avalanche of shredded mulch. As the cloud cleared, I saw that the trailer was nearly entirely buried. The loader operator cheerfully called out to me, and with a smile he asked if I wanted another scoop.
A few loads of mulch is just one phase in my ongoing project to rebuild the landscape of our Waikoloa home. Part of the plan is to take advantage of the green waste program at the county’s Kealakehe transfer station. Here you can drop your yard waste, clippings, leaves, branches and other trimmings, to exchange it for shredded mulch and compost. Our yard has practically no decent soils, just a thin layer of dirt over bedrock, ancient a’a lava flows from Mauna Kea. Bringing in large quantities of organic material will allow me to change this, with the eventual goal of a real vegetable garden.
The free mulch is one of the most valuable county services to Hawai’i landowners. It started as an effort to divert green waste from the landfill with a simple idea, provide an alternate place where this material can be dumped, with the added incentive of the exchange for compost and mulch.
The program is very successful. All one has to do to confirm this is to spend a few minutes at the drop off point. There you can watch load after load of green waste being dumped by a constant stream of vehicles coming through. All of that material may otherwise have ended up consuming limited landfill space.
Not all the material is diverted. Even with the green waste program at Kealakehe, and the similar operation on the Hilo side, many people will not make the effort to take yard waste any further than their local transfer station. Every time I drop the household trash at the local transfer station I watch other folks dumping entire loads of green waste into the trash chutes. I cringe at the sight of entire pickups full of yard debris shoveled out where it will eventually end up in the landfill. Kids help their parents unload plastic trash bags full of leaves and grass clippings, learning how to dispose of green waste the most wasteful way possible.
But many tons of material are diverted, enough to keep a small staff and several large pieces of equipment busy converting piles of organic debris into shredded mulch. The size of the pile testifies to the magnitude of the job, but also testified to thousands of cubic yards of landfill space spared, and many tons of rich organic material available to island gardeners.
As I have come to expect from Hawai’i county government, the Department of Environmental Management is busily trying to figure out how to take a successful program and screw it up. This is the same department that has been floating the idea of charging for all waste dropoff at transfer stations, despite the inevitable and predictable result of garbage dumping across the island. Everyone realizes that there is a cost to dealing with garbage, but implementing direct fees in place of general county funds simply encourages bad behavior, and the county ends up cleaning it up anyway.
For green waste, plans have been floated to close, or dramatically limit the days of operation for the waste drop point at the Kealakehe transfer station. At the same time moving the mulching operation much further from Kona to the landfill at Pu’uanahulu. The operation would be privatized, with drop off for homeowners free, but charging for the mulch. Many have questioned this move and how it works towards the goal of eliminating all green waste from the landfill by 2012. There is skepticism into how such an operation would be profitable without substantial subsidies, which raises the question as to why to privatize in the first place.
It has been community pressure that has kept the Department of Environmental Management from implementing it’s charge-for-everything policies. Our only option is to keep the pressure on when it comes to issues that have such a direct impact on island life.
In the meantime I hope to get a few more loads of material from the pile. It has been an an interesting process. The first time I pulled in with a load of waste I was a little lost as to where to drop off and pick up. The staff at the green waste facility was great, approaching their job with an aloha attitude and a bit of humor. After burying my trailer the driver was off with a smile and a wave to move another load for another customer.
Actually it was not as much trouble as I expected to free the trailer from the pile. I simply scraped off the top, reducing the pile to a load I felt was safe to tow home. At this point I simply had Deb pull the vehicle forward out of the pile. One quick scoop with the loader was enormously easier than shoveling a whole trailer load by hand, and it really was pretty easy to simply remove the excess. A few minutes later, with the load secured under a tarp, we pulled onto the highway for home. As we drove north I began to realize how much work it was going to be to shift this sizable load of mulch into my new vegetable garden.
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