Le Tour De Trash

So I wanted to hi-light this little tour. The Department of Environmental Services here in Hawaii is running a total of six tours over the course of this next year, and has designed the *FREE* tours to demonstrate how certain (for the most part large scale) buisnesses creatively manage their recycling. It also gives participants a tour of the waste water management plant(which sounds actually really cool, as opposed to boring--as in my memories of a 5th grade field trip boring--mostly because fyi, WWM here in Hawaii recycles sewage sludge into fertilizer pellets, aand uses some high tech video monitoring to keep close track of its sewage system status... wayy cool...and wayy important for the survival of this little island)

Island Shell (a local company that pulverizes used tire rubber and reuses it as compost and even--gasp--burns it for electricity),

Island Demo(which actually reuses a lot of building components, I assume for public projects, by onsite breakdown and later warehousing of useful materials),

Schnitzer Steel Hawaii (which smashes things haha! smash smash! it smashes fridges, it smashes cars, it smashes whateva you got, that's metal, and then sells? it back into the market for use...I'm a little bit blurry on what this means, but i gotta love that they smash stuff! :),

Automotive Equiptment Services (for the city of Honolulu, they recycle batteries and all kinds of car related stuff, but the cool thing I noted was that they also recycle the *water* used to wash the fleet of city vehicles...which probably amounts to quite a bit of liquid actually),

Waimanalo Gulch Sanitary Landfill (a controversy always surrounds the location and management of a landfill...here on Oahu that controversy has ended in the decision to move the landfill around every few years, so that no community is 'stuck' with it for too too long...right now it resides in Waimanalo...the cool things--to me--about this landfill is that they do methane recovery, and protect the ground from leaching garbage juice)

Pacific Biodiesel (which utilizes spent cooking oil, and makes it into biodiesel...we all have heard by now of biodiesel...what's cool about this here in Honolulu is that, unbeknownst to me, city AES vehicles use a B20 blend, which means 20% biodiesel--nice!)

and Hawaiian Earth Products (which recycles green waste into compost and mulch).

All of this is just awesome. Hawaii has a long way to go towards environmental sustainability, and we should be by now the forerunner of all US states in the category of eco-conscious practices--this includes recycling and careful management of our opala (the hawaiian word for refuse), this also includes the use of alternative energies, and finally the conscientious and careful diminishment of pollutants to our fragile environment.

This trash tour shows an enthusiasm at the state level for green friendly trash management. Excellent. What I wish I could see in this tour is a bit more of a user-friendly dimension. I wish DES was going to smaller buisnesses, running micro tours or recycling mixers, where small buisnesses could catch the creative recycling bug. I wish DES had incentive and grants programs that hilighted such buisnesses. I also wish that this tour had practical components like how to recycle your own company wide waste water, or how to grow a roof top garden...although, I think the visit to Hard Rock Cafe, for instance, which will show how they created a customer-friendly recycling sort..that's pretty good...and the visit to the drycleaners that recycles hangers, and the visit to Gyotaku Japanese Restaurant (which has a recycling program at work), these may prove to be excellent components of the tour. I dunno. I guess I'd like to check and see what Gyotaku is doing. As for the tour, I'm definitely checking it out. You should too. There's even a virtual tour online.

http://www.opala.org/solid_waste/Tour_de_Trash.htm