With Landfill Closing, Honolulu Considers Shipping Its Garbage Overseas

Honolulu is running out of room to dump the city's refuse — so officials are considering shipping 650,000 tons of trash a year overseas until they can open a new landfill.

The city issued a request for information earlier this month from companies willing to offer a 10-year solution before the existing landfill's state permit expires on March 2, 2028.

The Oct. 7 solicitation followed a failed 2020 attempt to ship the city's refuse to Washington state, the Honolulu Civil Beat reported Tuesday.

That plan was blocked by the Native American Yakama Nation, which filed a lawsuit to prevent the garbage from being dumped in a landfill on its ancestral lands near the Oregon border.

"It's been more than 10 years. Maybe now something's changed, and this might be something that could be useful," Honolulu Department of Environmental Services Director Roger Babcock told the Civil Beat.

The problem is especially pressing because the city's managing director, Mike Formby, told the City Council in March that designing and building landfill takes about eight years once a site has been selected.

Most of the city's garbage now gets incinerated and about 225,000 tons of ash, along with about 75,000 to tons of nonburnable trash, gets dumped each year at Waimanalo Gulch Sanitary Landfill overlooking the western coast of the island of Oahu, according to the request for information.

City officials have yet to come up with a replacement site, even after repeatedly extending the deadline for a decision, now set for Dec. 31.

"That's something we're working hard on right now," Babcock said.