About 94,000 tons of commercial food waste goes into Oʻahu's H-POWER facility every year. The food gets incinerated at H-POWER, where the energy from the waste is converted into electricity.
However, environmental advocates argue that the process still leaves ash, and it takes a substantial amount of energy to burn through the moisture-packed foods.
A new solution was announced Tuesday by the City and County of Honolulu to start a composting pilot project.
The Oʻahu Compost Project collects food waste from restaurants and turns it into compost for local farms.
With Hawaiʻi's hot and humid conditions, the startling smell of marinating compost can be the first thing that comes to mind for many.
To combat that, city officials announced that the waste is kept in what looks like a normal trash bin, but the lid is sealed and locked to keep out pests.
They say there's no smell when the lids are on, and when it's open, the scent is minor. Also, a regular pick-up by the nonprofit organization Aloha Harvest seeks to eliminate the hassle by bringing the bins to a composting facility once a week.
“Food rescue means fewer hungry people, less wasted food and less food we need to import,” said Phil Acosta, executive director of Aloha Harvest.
The collected waste is then sent to decompose at Full Circle Farms in Waimānalo through an aerobic process. The food waste is mixed with mulch in an industrial machine for four weeks, where the nitrogen from the food and the carbon from the mulch create an ideal environment for microbes to break it down for compost.
The farm currently has the capacity to process 1,000 pounds of food scraps and create 500 pounds of compost every day.
"We're going to dramatically change how we treat our food waste," said Honolulu Mayor Rick Blangiardi.
"All the food that goes down garbage disposals, and what happens to that, and what that causes in the sewer system and everything else that we have to deal with — and even though we've got good treatment plants and whatever, there's a much better way to be able to treat our food waste much more efficient, that could actually result in creating some great products to make it reusable," said Blangiardi.
The pilot project is limited to restaurants in Chinatown. Based on the results of the pilot project, the city plans on expanding the program island-wide.
