Newsmaker

Name: Keith Nishioka
Age: 45
Education: McKinley, University of Hawaii
Occupation: Army facilities maintenance coordination manager at Fort Shafter
Hobbies: Golf, fishing

Nishioka, who will be honored today (Earth Day) in a special Pentagon ceremony in Washington, D.C., for winning the Army's 1995 Recycling Award, said another benefit of the recycling program has been the reduced volume of trash dumped in the city's landfills.

Nishioka is being honored for developing and implementing a curbside recycling program for more than 20,000 Army, Navy, Marine Corps and Air Force housing units in Hawaii in 1993.

The military estimates that the voluntary recycling program for discarded newspapers, glass, plastic containers, aluminum cans and corrugated cardboard saves the military more than $1 million annually in trash pickup costs alone.

Those savings are returned to the military in upgrading its housing facilities and maintaining them better, said Nishioka, who has been working for the federal government for 21 years.

He believes that the recycling program at least for the Army may eventually become a mandatory one because of the savings it brings to the military's refuse collection program as the cost of the program continues to drop.

"The cost of refuse collection would go down dramatically," Nishioka said, "and the military could divert those dollars into other maintenance requirements."

Nishioka said the initial recycling program was tested out at Kaneohe Marine Corps Base in 1993 where trash pickup went from twice to once a week.

"The other pickup date is now used to collect recyclable materials," he said. "Initially, there were complaints because trash was being picked up only once a week and that the containers weren't big enough."

Since then the program was expanded to all military housing units. Families are now issued a 95-gallon bin instead of an 82-gallon bin for their trash as well as two 12-gallon plastics bins for recyclable materials.

"One plastic bin is for paper and the other is for plastic and glass items. Large cardboard boxes also will be picked up as long as they are broken down and flattened."

The use of the larger and more durable trash containers, Nishioka said, also has resulted in savings since the new bins last longer than the older smaller ones.

Nishioka's award also cites his performance in leading the military's participation in the state and city's Christmas tree recycling project for the past six years.

His other achievements include winning the 1995 federal energy and water management award from the U.S. Department of Energy and for his work on a joint project between the Army a private contractor to invest in more energy-efficient appliances.