Man hopes for gold in curbside recycling challenge

Awidely dispersed population and big geography means that anyone trying to kickstart a curbside recycling business in West Hawaii is going to face some obstacles.

On Earth Day two years ago, Ocean View resident Dustin Strom decided he was up for the challenge.

“I thought, something needs to be done here,” he said. “I see all the recyclables just going into a landfill. It’s a shame.”

For a few thousand dollars, he bought a tiny recycling business with 40 clients, most of them in Keauhou Estates. He renamed the business Rainbow Recycling, and through postcards, fliers and newspaper and Craigslist ads, he’s slowly added accounts.

It seemed like the right thing to do. Beyond the fact that reducing waste is part of the good fight, Strom needed the extra money to fill the gaps in a somewhat sporadic paycheck from his landscaping business.

Strom is a small operator; he works from one pickup truck, traveling up from his home in Ocean View on Mondays and Tuesdays, servicing about 60 accounts scattered from Kona Paradise to Palisades, most of them in Keauhou.

Catch him on Tuesdays and he’s knee-deep sorting HI-5 cans and bottles. It’s not always pleasant.

“People don’t always clean up,” he said. “I’ve had a few horror days.”

Strom charges $25 a month for weekly pickup of mixed recycling from a 33-gallon barrel with wheels. He collects the HI-5 items for free and figures he processes about 750 pounds of recycling a week.

“I’m stacked to the gills when I’m all separated and sorted,” he said. “It’s slowly growing. People come out and tell me how much they appreciate what I’m doing.”

“The people who have it, love it, and don’t understand why more people aren’t doing it,” he said.

Strom, a larger Kailua-Kona outfit called Hana Hou Recycling and a few other smaller operators, have helped individual efforts to cut into the 179,000 tons of garbage that spilled into east and west Hawaii Island landfills last year.

Island residents recycled 60,000 tons of material in 2015, according to the county Department of Environmental Management. But Strom points to the popularity of curbside recycling in Colorado even back when he left that state in 1987, and many agree that more should be done to follow the Three Rs and prolong the life of the island’s landfills.

“What many people don’t understand is that recycling is an economically superior system to dumping in a landfill,” said Nick Riznyk, owner of Hana Hou Recycling. “Under the principle of zero waste, most waste has a value and can be an asset instead of a cost. The last study contracted by the county found that annually, the Big Island could have made over $11 million in reselling material diverted from the landfill.”

Riznyk estimates that Hana Hou Recycling, in business since 2008, diverts five to 15 tons a week from landfills.

Riznyk said the argument arises — particularly from new residents and visitors — that recycling should be free. But those services in densely populated areas are never actually free; they’re covered by municipal taxes of some sort, he said.

And again, there are challenges to operating these kinds of programs in non-urban regions.

“Operation costs are quite high relative to a low volume of residents,” he said. “A municipal service solution is not viable because the tax base can’t/won’t support the costs.”

That said, recycling has definitely caught on here, Riznyk said.

“Residents and businesses want to recycle more and more,” he said. “Just check out the overflowing recycling dumpsters most times at any transfer station, or the line at any Atlas Recycling Center, because it’s perceived as a good thing, and one can make some redemption money as well.”

Bootstrapping a new business and working it alone isn’t necessarily easy, especially when it involves sorting “trash.” Strom has his own way of summing it all up:

“I’m hoping for good karma points.”

Email Bret Yager at byager@westhawaiitoday.com.