Questions about the proposed Hilo incinerator

[peteadams]

The other day I was spreading bags of chicken manure on to one of our raised garden beds and wondering how the heck these large, thick and very dirty plastic bags could be recycled. With frustration I ended up putting them in the trash. So that incident provokes my note of skepticism about eliminating a waste disposal method that is guaranteed to deal with my dirty bags and all the other tons of plastic packaging we use as consumers and industrially. The billions of greasy potato chip bags, grubby deli sandwich boxes and messy frozen pizza wraps. Just think about the many yards of shrink wrap that go around palleted materials which themselves are frequently forty or fifty heavy duty plastic sacks containing some possibly toxic material. And so on and on. In all the many years of our trying to recycle as much as possible I simply do not see any move or effort to try to deal with the vast bulk of plastic products that are not shiny, washable #1 soda bottles and the like. Does anyone think that all this plastic waste is actually likely to be recycled?

So in this sense alone I like the idea of burning this junk plastic and getting some energy return from it and for the most part making it disappear from our islands. How about sending container loads to the WTE plant on Oahu via the HSF? Does anyone actually have any other serious proposal for dealing with our mountains of plastic waste in the near term? Ideally there should be some way of seriously dealing with the recycling reality of both dirty plastic and the large variety of plastic types that exist today. That would be far better but even with all the talk about incentives I really don't see it happening.