We are fortunate to live in a place that is green and lush with vegetation. But in many neighborhoods, some of that green becomes "waste."
What happens to it when our neighbors put that waste in their green bins? Kirk has the answer in today's Be Green 2.
Conscientious neighbors keep their yards neat and trimmed. But what happens to all those leaves, limbs and clippings when they leave the yard? Most likely the city sends all that on to Hawaiian Earth Products.
"Hawaiian Earth Products has partnered with the City and County and we take all the green waste, recycling island wide,” explains Liana Bisch, Sales and Marketing Manager of Hawaiian Earth Products, “It comes to our facility so we take in about 90 thousand tons a year. By January of 2013, we'll be taking one million tons.”
One million tons of that are used to go to the landfill.
"It comes to our facility and we make compost. We recycle it to make compost,” says Bisch.
Hawaiian Earth Products is well equipped to turn the green waste into compost.
"Our compost is a hundred percent organic. It is made just from our green waste recycling. We don't add anything except, we water it and we turn it and it goes in wind rows which are about 16 feet wide and 16 feet high and about 500 feet long and we turn it once a week," she explains.
And on 55 acres, it happens big and fast.
"And we can speed the process up of making compost. What would normally be the consistency, someone would probably have to take over a year to do it in their backyard. So we're taking the process and speeding it up quite a bit," remarks Bisch.
The compost is available for pickup at the Campbell Industrial Park. It's also available in smaller quantities.
"Bag product of course is not going to be big volume, but if you have like a little garden bed that you wanted to add just a little bit of compost, you can add a little bit of compost, you can buy it that way as well," she notes.
There are two Hawaiian Earth Products locations on Oahu: Campbell Industrial Park (91-400 Malakole Road) and 101 Kapa’a Quarry Road in Kailua. Kirk Matthews, KHON2 News, Hawaii's News Leader.
