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Honolulu Lite Charles Memminger |
Sludge recycling plant
is dying on NIMBY vineThe trouble with Oahu is it really is just one big back yard. Just try finding a place to situate something vaguely controversial such as a small plutonium reactor, a garbage-to-more-garbage plant or a garishly painted lunch wagon, and suddenly it's nothing but back yards from Hawaii Kai to Haleiwa. And nobody wants something stinky, dangerous or highly profitable built in their back yard.
The latest controversial proposal has turned Sand Island into a back yard -- no easy trick since it is bordered on three sides by water and the fourth by concrete. Sand Island doesn't even have a front yard.
Nevertheless, enough people have whined about a proposed sludge-to-fertilizer plant being built at the Sand Island Wastewater Treatment Facility that the Honolulu City Council continues to weasel out of deciding on whether to grant a permit to allow the plant to be constructed.
Exercising the doctrine of "Why put off till tomorrow what you can put off till the next Council meeting?" the Council deferred acting on Synagro Technology's request for a permit to build a facility that would recycle 25,000 tons of sludge a year, sludge that currently is hauled to the Waimanalo Gulch Landfill. The proposed plant would turn the sludge into fertilizer pellets, which sounds like a laudable, "Save the Earth" kind of thing to do.
But apparently it isn't, because one of the groups opposing the plant is Earthjustice, a nonprofit environmental protection organization whose motto is -- and I'm not kidding -- "Because the Earth needs a good lawyer."
I'M NOT SURE why the Earth needs a good lawyer, other than because of that nasty rumor about a drunken spring-break encounter it had with Uranus in a Key West motel room. Or maybe Earth is going to file a class-action lawsuit against the other planets for creating unnecessary gravitational pull that causes various small woodland creatures to be grumpy and irritable.
In any case, Earthjustice seems to feel that the Earth itself is one big back yard and if you want to set up an oil-drilling or sludge-to-fertilizer operation, you'd better move it to Pluto, buster.
Earthjustice and others against the sludge processing plant, such as the longshoremen union and Sand Island business owners, have legitimate concerns about the safety of the operation. It's terrific that you can extract all the nasty, toxic junk from sludge and make safe little fertilizer pellets, but it causes one to wonder: What happened to all the nasty, toxic junk?
Business owners want to make sure they and their customers aren't breathing it, and the shipping companies and longshoremen want to make sure it doesn't end up in the water, and surrounding neighborhoods want to make sure poisons won't seep their way. Earthjustice is against it for all the above reasons and more.
The question is, What do you do with garbage and sludge on an island? Sometimes we do need to build landfills, waste-treatment plants and recycling centers. They have to exist somewhere. I'd offer my back yard for such a worthwhile cause except it's cluttered, unmown and, with all the broken lanai furniture, just wouldn't be quite right.
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Charles Memminger, winner of National Society of Newspaper Columnists awards, appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays. E-mail cmemminger@starbulletin.com