History

1)
Anyone could tell you that at some point solid waste disposal would
become a huge problem on this island and for the state. We live in the
most isolated island chain in the world, so yes, at some point we would
have to run out of space. Generally, we have never been big on
reducing, reusing, or recycling. We get almost all of our food and
commercial products shipped or flown in from the mainland and we are
ignorant of the labor that is put into each thing. The “throw away
society” began after WWII. During the war virtually everything was
recycled: rubber, paper, any scrap metal, tin cans, and fats, to help
the war effort. It diverted about 25% of the waste from the waste
stream. When the war ended companies took advantage of the optimistic
and commercialized public. They began making one-use products so people
would have to keep buying them again and again, and they used the
newest ways to advertise them. In the years 1958 to 1976 the amount of
packaging produced and disposed of in the United States increased by
67%. That major increase set up Hawaii for trouble, and the lack of
any major war-time conflicts since then allowed that same consumerism
attitude to trickle down through the generations. Without any major
recycling programs or alternatives to sanitary landfills, most everyone
should have known that one day soon, at the rate we were going, the
dumps would all fill to the brim.