Company scraps
plan to recycle
isle sludge

Efforts to build blocked twice,
N-Viro leaves after the city
has paid it $450,000

By Gordon Y.K. Pang
Star-Bulletin

N-Viro International has abandoned its three-year effort to put up a sludge recycling facility on Oahu.

J. Patrick Nicholson, chief executive officer, informed Mayor Jeremy Harris yesterday of the decision.

In 1994, the city awarded a 10-year contract to Toledo, Ohio-based N-Viro that would have paid it roughly $2.8 million annually to process sludge into marketable topsoil and soil additives.

But plans to put the facility at Campbell Industrial Park were opposed by the Coalition Against the Transport of Sludge.

The group, made up of park businesses, said the facility would bring unwanted odors, and it questioned the trucking of effluent to the area from treatment plants across Oahu.

N-Viro insisted that the plant would be odorless and that its operations were safe.

Last Oct. 31, Harris scrapped that proposal.

A subsequent effort to place the N-Viro facility next to the city's Honouliuli Wastewater Treatment Plant in Ewa was also nixed when city officials said that site would make the project economically unfeasible.

"We regret that we were not able to reach an agreement with N-Viro on a viable plan to recycle the sludge that we remove from our waste water," Harris said in a prepared release.

The city has paid N-Viro about $450,000. Nicholson said while the city owes his company money, a memorandum of understanding has been reached to forgive the debt.

Linda Smith, who headed the coalition opposed to N-Viro, said, "We believe the city and county has reached a good decision in recognizing that there are alternative and more cost-effective solutions."

Smith, whose Pacific Allied Products was near the proposed site, said mainland experts raised legitimate questions about the potential of air pollution.

The sludge also would have been "transported through residential and commercial streets, where there is a high possibility of accident," she said.

City Councilman Steve Holmes, who heads the Council's Public Works Committee, said he is disappointed with the outcome.

Holmes said the city invested $450,000 and three years of its time. "And what have got to show for it? Not much," he said.

N-Viro has a good reputation, he said. "They recycle sludge in many areas of the mainland and could have done a good job here."