DROP BOX CONTAMINATION

        Several times recently, I've heard the comment that it's a waste of time to recycle on Maui using the community dropboxes because "they're just hauled to the dump."
    Unfortunately it is true that sometimes - but very rarely - a residential recycling dropbox must be taken to the dump for disposal. The reason has nothing to do with the company hauling and maintaining the dropboxes. It has to do with ignorant people in the community who take advantage of the availability of the drop-off locations and use the dropboxes for their own household garbage. When my home composting demo area was located next to the Upcountry dropbox site, I saw first-hand old car engines, car and marine batteries, and bags of household garbage stuffed into the bins. One of the worst cases was the carcass of a deer in the plastics bin.

        The haulers are required to look into the bins and if they see something suspicious, smelly, disgusting or otherwise not what should be in there, they must take the entire load to the dump. At first it seems like such a waste, 'someone' could simply remove a bag of garbage, right? Well, consider what happened at the private, for-profit company that does the plastic processing. Their employee started sorting the load of plastic dumped on the loading dock. He saw a big black plastic bag and, thinking it was full of plastic bottles, opened it up to discover - a dead dog! From then on, the recyclers were not required to accept loads with obvious contamination; they found they couldn't pay people enough to sort out the really disgusting garbage from the usable plastic items.

        Thanks to the untiring efforts of people at Community Work Day, the County of Maui Recycling Office, the trash haulers who offer recycling, our one and only curbside recycler - Maui Recycling Service, responsible residents and businesses, and my own organization, we have a 30-plus percent recycling rate on Maui. It's never a 'waste of time' to do the right thing but it wastes all our time when irresponsible people do the wrong thing.

Joy Webster