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A WAY WITH WASTE HUNTER HEAIVILIN It is a hot summer day in the late 2000s. I am sweating in my air-conditionless truck, windows up in a futile attempt to keep the dust and smell at bay, waiting in a line of vehicles at the Waimänalo Gulch Sanitary Landfill. I have come prepared to do my civic duty and deposit some bulky materials from a long-forgotten home improvement project. In front of me, a semi-truck bucks forward as we all advance a pace towards the burial place of the detritus of O‘ahu’s population. As my stomach grumbles about hunger, an arm appears out of the truck ahead of me holding the remnants of a plate lunch: styrofoam clamshell and utensils encapsulated in a plastic bag, closed with a bow redolent of holidays past. The arm extends and drops the bag to the ground. I’m initially struck by such brash littering, indignant that someone would do such a thing, as if the “Keep America Beautiful” campaigns (ironically funded by the likes of Philip Morris and Coca-Cola) had never managed to reach our shores across the Pacific. But there is no public outcry. No other drivers leave their vehicles to claim this misdeed. And suddenly the hypocrisy of the situation strikes me: I am here to do just the same thing, to dump my own debris, and drive home without a second thought. Waves of understanding roll upon me like the quivers of heat beyond my dashboard: all garbage is litter; we have just found ways to sanctify our waste, to make pollution tolerable, to couch it in “responsibility,” and even veil it in supposedly noble stewardship. But ultimately there is no “away,” no place beyond where our actions have no impact. We are inextricably wed to our lifestyles and their repercussions. I drive home with an empty truck bed, but a full mind, determined to do something, anything, to lessen my impact and to walk more lightly through this life and on this land. A few years later I find myself standing in front of a roomful of tired-eyed middle schoolers, recounting this tale and asking them: “What is waste?” The usual answers emerge: “junk,” “trash,” “stuff we don’t want,” “things we can’t use.” To which I offer a now rote response: “What is waste in nature?” The 112 WASTE MANAGEMENT room falls silent until the answers come tentatively forward: “leaves?”, “bird poop?”, “branches?”, and finally “nothing . . . ?” I can’t help but crack a smile as heads cock and turn to look at the precocious speaker. I reply, “Yes! Nothing is wasted; in natural systems the waste of one becomes the food of another.” This is my gambit towards reconceiving waste: building the understanding that waste, more than anything else, is a mindset. The goal for the day is to get the kids interested enough in waste to have them help me perform an onsite audit of the trash their school had produced the day prior. Mid-audit, their intrigue peaks as they watch me find a whole discarded banana and proceed to carefully peel and consume it. With that transgressive act, any remnant tired eyes grow wide, as “waste equals food” goes from being a concept to a reality. WASTE IS A MINDSET Etymologically, “waste” derives from the same root as “vast,” connoting emptiness and desolation. Only a cursory exploration of this connection brings to mind the landscapes we leave in the wake of our processing: the stumps where forests stood, the mines where mountains ranged, and ultimately the windswept desert landfills. The items we cast aside represent not the progress of our day but more so the hubris that we can continue to live on the overextended credit of our natural resources, hoping the debt never comes due. Waste, through designation, is an act and an expression of a mindset, whereas resources are what are really being lost by such action. When we recast our understanding of waste as misappropriated resources, we are faced with a design problem: How do our islands, nearly wholly reliant upon imports,1 manage the overwhelming amount of resources shipped to our shores? Are these problems or opportunities? Whether or not we wanted them shipped here in the first place, we must find a way to deal with the onslaught of resources . In 2011, Hawai‘i generated an average of 7.12 pounds of waste per person per day.2 In 2008 we...

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