 My name is Dorei Shin and you are watching Think Tech Hawaii and this show is called Finding Our Future so we are exploring solutions to climate change and other issues facing Hawaii and the world. So today I have Nicole Chatterson, she's the director of Zero Waste O'ahu and we're also good friends so it's really awesome to have you here to talk story. Yeah, thanks for having me here. So I'm hoping that you can just share why you're here, like who you are in the community and what you're passionate about. Sure. So I'm here representing Zero Waste O'ahu. I am the director of that coalition and Zero Waste O'ahu is made up of several different groups, so surf rider, O'ahu chapter, Sierra Club, Sustainable Coast Lines, Honolulu Tool Library, Kanu Hawaii and Kokua Hawaii Foundation and we all came together understanding that missions of those different groups dealt with Zero Waste and sort of on a tangent but nobody was directed or had the mission statement or the funds to work on kind of broad Zero Waste policy. So that's how Zero Waste O'ahu started. I'm a waste nerd. I have been thinking about this issue for a long time. Yeah, and I'm excited to now be a part of this group who's focusing our efforts. And a lot of people know about probably some of those organizations you listed in Hawaii. Some of them are pretty prominent, so I'm wondering what you feel like is the vision for Zero Waste O'ahu now, like where do you guys fit in, like what's the role of Zero Waste O'ahu and why is it important that you exist? Sure. So our vision is to build a waste-free future for Hawaii or rebuild a waste-free future prior to business as usual. Hawaii used to be a place that lived in line, where people lived in line with resources and trash wasn't a part of our existence. So we want to help get that back and we're doing that in three main ways. So through education and public outreach, so I do a lot of talks and I try to do talks in spaces that some of our member groups don't reach, right? So surfwriter has a following, sustainable cosines has a following and that's amazing. And how do we bring this message into other spaces also? And the other way we're getting out there is through policy reform. So we'll talk a little bit about Bill 40 at some point, but we work with all of these groups to help uplift waste reduction policy. And then the last thing we're doing is Zero Waste Demonstration Project. So right now, Zero Waste kind of sounds like this pie-in-the-sky goal. It's not very practical. And we see our role as starting to show ways that Zero Waste can happen. So it can be really manini things like helping a local co-working space, the Impact Hub, who's also a member of the Zero Waste Oahu Coalition, helping them get their food waste from point A to point B. Or on a larger scale, we're supporting the University of Hawaii in doing waste audits at each of the campuses so they can start building Zero Waste System. For people who don't know what is Zero Waste, what does it really mean? Okay, yeah, so it's the official definition is like three paragraphs long. Yes, I've seen that. I'm like, why is it so long? So long. The easiest way to think about it is it's a goal to divert 90% of our waste. So it kind of acknowledges that it's impossible at this point to not create any waste and it also is a framework that pushes us to do better. And so we're keeping things out of the landfill. We're keeping things out of incineration first by reducing all of the stuff we make. And then as you go down the line, you start composting and recycling as necessary. But Zero Waste really asks us to look upstream and stop making things that we need to either throw away or recycle or burn or compost. Totally. For people who are really trying to reduce their waste, what would you say are the most common sources of waste that they should be focusing on? I think food waste is a top one. I mean, I care about this stuff so much and I have yet to figure out how to not buy too much lettuce at the farmer's market and have some of it go bad. My friend Andrea from Vegan in Hawaii shared a pro tip with that, which is you can rehydrate your greens once you get them from the farmer's market. You put your kale in a cup of water and it blossoms back up. So there are lots of tricks like that to keep your food lasting longer. And when waste does happen, making sure to compost it or feed it to worms or get a bokashi bucket. I think that the US average is about 40% of the food purchased in the home is wasted. And there are huge greenhouse gas implications of that. So it's a great place to start. I mean, to bring your own bag and bring your own water bottle thing, I think it's been well socialized and you see it all over the place now. I think something important to consider is, I love my hydroflast. It's a $35 water bottle, right? So there's a real cost barrier there. And I think we've forgotten that zero waste needs to be an inclusive solution for everybody. And so how do we also make it just as cool to bring in your mason jar and use that for water? It's something free, it's reusable. You're not kind of demanding a new thing to be created. Totally, yeah. Yeah, there's definitely a market behind reusable bamboo utensil sets. And it's like, I mean, that's cool and I have one because I really find it convenient to have the pouch. For people who can't afford that premium reusable product, it is like you have all these jars you're throwing away for water that you could use for water. And you have metal forks, everyone has reusable items at home for the most part. And I was at an event, it was with these Sirfighter UH girls, a club. And one of them had brought the Adams peanut butter jar. And then another girl was like, that's my favorite water bottle. She was like, I love that glass jar, the way I just love it's my favorite one. And I thought it was really funny how they were celebrating this peanut butter jar that they both love to use this water bottle. So just that's a creative solution as well. And that's the heart of zero waste and the heart of the movement is how do we make do with what we already have and break the cycle of needing to just reroute our consumer culture from being really bad to slightly less bad. Right, so how do you feel about this? Cuz there's kind of this narrative that there's this like alternative. Everything has an alternative equivalent. Like you can just buy the alternative. But to me that's like, okay, well that's still the consumption culture. It's still feeding into in some ways like an excess of use of waste and resources. So how do you kind of grapple with that conversation around consumption in terms of like better alternatives versus like this less capitalist approach of circular community base? Like what are your perspectives on that? Yeah, that's a good question. I think are you familiar with Malcolm Gladwell's curve of a diffusion of innovation curve? Not really. Oh, is that like the bell curve like early adopters? Yes. Yeah. So I think for the early adopters of the movement, the people who were using the stainless steel straw and it probably cost $20. Right. Those people are great candidates for leveling up and moving away from consumption as the solution. Right. And for the people who never wanted to come on board, but just have to because the society is changing. And Malcolm Gladwell would call those the laggards. I think maybe we need some replacements there. Like, okay, you really need disposable water bottles. Maybe aluminum water bottles have a place for those people. I don't think we actually need them, but I see where that compromise is useful. We're getting everybody on board because the goal isn't, I'm sure you see that quote going around, we don't need a million people, a few people doing zero waste perfectly. We need millions doing it. Totally. Yeah. We really drive this message that like wherever you are, there's like a step for you to take. And like offering those options to people as support. And so what do you find as a person who's pretty prominent in this movement is like a really common thing people always ask you or are confused about? Why does our recycling system suck? Yes. Yeah. Everyone knows it sucks, but they don't really know the intricacies. Yeah. And I think there's a lot of interesting history around why we feel like recycling is the ultimate environmental good. And it was the idea of recycling was marketed to us by the plastic industry, by the packaging industry because in the 70s there was a revolt around all of this trash, all of a sudden being created. And instead of our single use beverage manufacturers going out of business, they're like, well, just put it in the blue bin and we'll turn it into something else and it's fine. And it's such an easy thing to do in comparison to changing your lifestyle, right, to not use anything single use. And so from the get go, I wonder if the recycling system was ever set up to do what we really needed it to do, which was reduce our environmental impact. It was set up to be a business, so it's a commodities market. And plastic is recyclable because it has a value. Aluminums recyclable because it has a value not because we have the technical ability to recycle it or not. Technically, we can recycle most of the materials we make. It's whether or not it's economically valuable, profitable for somebody to do it. So what that results in on the ground for the average person trying to recycle in Honolulu is now for us to sell plastic besides plastic number one and plastic number two. Nobody's taking it globally. And that's for a lot of different reasons that we can get into more if you want. But then we have to put it in the landfill. So I wonder how much better could recycling be if it wasn't about the money, but it was about the environmental good, right? And not the environmental good by itself, the social good. Like when we're sending our plastic bottles overseas for a long time, we were sending them to China. And somebody is taking through piles of trash to get that out. There are places where people were melting down plastic in their homes to then sell it to factories and make it into something else. So there's a lot there. Yeah. And we're waking up to it now. Right. So obviously recycling, it's like a global market and it's volatile from what I've heard. And it's just like so up and down and sometimes it's great and sometimes it's bad. And recently it's been really bad. And that's why it's like really harmful in a lot of ways. So the recycling process we go through. And I feel like again, like that goes back to our economic system. It's like relying on this like material as a commodity, like something that's sold on the market and thinking about how that distracts us from the purpose of the activity we're doing. Yeah. So what are your, because I've been thinking like maybe it just like needs to be an investment by our government. It's a publicly funded approach to waste management. Like it's not so reliant on these global markets. Like maybe we're really pushing taxpayer and government money into something like this because we know it's the right thing to do. So what are your thoughts on that? Like do you feel it should be more of a publicly funded thing? Or like how do we solve, because recycling can be good if done properly. How do we solve that problem and like shift their economic mindset to like be actually beneficial? Yeah, that's a huge question. And I think one of the things that scares people about the idea of zero waste because when you really dig into why we're in such a bad spot, the kind of zero waste framework helps you see that it's capitalist culture. It's our over consumption. And so is zero waste asking us to be something else? And maybe, and I don't know the answer to what that looks like exactly. We tend to talk about these things in polarity. Like if you're not a capitalist culture, then you're communist. And those are your options. Like spectrum. Yeah, there's a spectrum of things, right? And what if there are options that aren't even on this line we've created? And I think one of the first steps is starting to have real conversations about the different possibilities. And that's where things like sharing economy and circular economy. And the idea of Kanaka Namak. So Kamana Beamer talks a lot about that. These these ideas are starting to come about where we're divorcing from a system of making things and finding other ways to create profits. So it's still a profit driven model, right? Or maybe a prosperity model. It's based on people rather than just money. Yeah. And it's, I mean, so tricky to unwind everything to get to a place like that. I think people like Regina Clem out of HPU. She thinks about the gross national happiness or gross progress I forget which one it is, but she's trying to, you know, push us to measure Hawaii's success in ways other than gross domestic profit. Totally. I think all of those are start. Yeah. And it's, I mean, it took us a long time to get ourselves into this mess. And whatever the solutions are, are going to take more time than than we want them to or maybe even than we have, right? If you're thinking about the IPCC report, the 10 to 12 years of needing to act quickly. Yeah. That's one of the things that, you know, keeps me up at night. And like, can we do this quickly enough and come on people? Like, yeah, you know, jump to it. Right. Well, we should talk about solutions, but we got to take a quick break. So yeah, we'll talk about all of that when we get back. Hi, I'm Rusty Kamori, host of Beyond the Lines. I was the head coach for the Punahou Boys Varsity Tennis Team for 22 years. And we're fortunate to win 22 consecutive state championship. This show is based on my book, which is also titled Beyond the Lines. And it's about leadership, creating a superior culture of excellence, achieving and sustaining success, and finding greatness. If you're a student, parent, sports or business person, and want to improve your life and the lives of people around you, tune in and join me on Mondays at 11 a.m. as we go Beyond the Lines on Think Tech Hawaii. Aloha. Aloha, I'm your host Sharon Thomas Yarbrough, a sister power here at Think Tech of IE. And sister power is all about motivating, empowering, educating and inspiring all people. And we have various subjects here. Sister power is here at Think Tech every other Thursday at 4 p.m. Again, my name is Sharon Thomas Yarbrough, host of Sister Power. We look forward to seeing you. If you have any questions, feel free to contact me at sistersandpowerandkawaii at gmail.com. Look forward to chatting with you soon. Aloha. So we're back here with Nicole Chatterson. She's the director of Zero Waste O'ahu, and we're just talking about consumption and waste and how we find solutions to the big waste problem we have here in Hawaii and our world. So where do we leave off? I think we were talking about climate, the climate crisis. So yeah, how do we pivot from that? Like climate crisis is huge. Waste has such a big part of that. Like it's what we interact with every single day. So what are ways that people can find hope and be part of the solution? So I realized in talking about this problem, some people get overwhelmed at the staff. But I'm gonna share a few anyway because I think for some people they're really useful. So our greenhouse gas portfolio, our greenhouse gas emissions portfolio, about 42% of that comes from us extracting materials to make things that we then throw away or burn. What's that percent? 42. Yeah, so almost half. Yeah, and when we think about wanting to make change on our greenhouse gas trajectory, you start to see how consuming less makes a big difference. What are they? Another thing that I think is important to think about when we're thinking about what we can do is only 9% of plastic gets recycled. And by 2050, if we keep using plastic as we do, about 20% of our fossil fuel extraction will be going towards making plastic. So knowing these things, I think is a powerful place to start. And another thing that I think is important to know is that here we're burning most of our trash and that has both greenhouse gas emissions, implications and social justice implications here. And so knowing that allows you to act differently too. Exactly, yeah. So for folks who are confused about our trash, we know that we're burning basically everything. So can you just share a little bit? Cause you've done your masters on H-Power and Incineration here on Oahu. So it's really specific to your expertise. Just hoping you can share like a few really important things that people shouldn't know about that. Yeah, absolutely. So one of the common relationships that happens between incinerators and municipalities is that the company running this incinerator, which in our case is Covanta, asks the city to sign a contract, which the city and county of Honolulu did that says you will give us this amount of trash every year. In our case, it's 800,000 tons per year of waste. And for several years, we were not giving them enough trash, which if you're coming from the reduction mindset and you're like, oh yeah, producing all of that stuff is about 42% of our greenhouse gas emissions, then you're like, wow, that's really ridiculous that we're being asked to keep trash production at a certain level. For what, pay? We pay for good behavior. Yeah, so we paid several million dollars as taxpayers for not producing enough trash from 2014 to 2017. And I hear that we're now producing closer to the quota. Some of which is probably aligned with the changes in what's recyclable, right? So we're throwing more things away because the recycling market has changed. So anyway, there's a lot of problems with requiring us to deliver a certain amount of trash. The other thing that's an issue is we've positioned our incinerator H-Power as clean energy. It's a part of our renewable energy portfolio for the state of Hawaii. And across the world, different municipalities have been kicking waste to energy off of their renewable energy portfolio because what we're finding is trash, if you look at it one way, you could say, oh, we're always gonna produce trash, we need something to do with it. When you're looking at trash as fuel from another angle, you're like, wow, there's this much energy that goes into making that stuff, this much land, water, et cetera. You realize what a waste it is. And as it's coming out of the smokestack, per megawatt hour, which is a unit of energy, H-Power produces more carbon emissions than Haje, which is our largest oil plant, and is just over AES, which is our coal plant. More emissions, just as is. I'm guessing that H-Power doesn't produce as much energy as those plants. No, so H-Power produces about 68 megawatts. And I'm forgetting AES and Kaje now, but Kaje is, I think, up at like 268 megawatts. So you're saying H-Power is pumping out more greenhouse gases, but producing less energy. Am I getting that right? Producing less energy. So in the scheme of things, less emissions come directly from H-Power because they're only producing one blip of our energy, right? But per blip, it's more polluting. And so one of the arguments is that we should be shifting to more and more renewables. And one of the conversations we've been a part of is, well, should we add a fourth boiler on to H-Power? And when you're thinking about people are arguing it's renewable energy, it's like, oh, well, yeah, add a fourth boiler. We don't really, we wanna be replacing oil and we wanna be replacing coal, but we don't wanna be replacing it with something that's worse. Third year per megawatt, yeah, yeah. Ridiculous. So thank you for doing that research on those. I mean, no, that's tedious stuff. One question I wanna ask is, I just found out that apparel, like clothing, it's about 10% of greenhouse gases. And I'm just wondering like, what are your thoughts on that? Cause people aren't talking about it. There was a study that came out that said in order to save the planet, people in the developed world should be buying no more than three new articles of clothing every year, which is just like crazy for most people to think about. I have had phases where I was only thrift shopping for a few years when I was younger, but I would find that challenging today. So anyway, what are your thoughts on the apparel industry? That's a big nut to crack. And thankfully there are more people starting to look at it, so two things pop up for me. One is microplastics. So most, I mean, what I'm wearing today is polyester. And every time I wash this, little shards of plastic are going into our water supply. And right now we don't have a good way of cleaning those up even. So people are really starting to tackle that issue by making alternative fibers. So I'm a part of a fellowship program with a company that's making potentially a polyester replacement out of algae. Oh, awesome. So it's not gonna shed down into plastic in the ocean, right? Yeah, right, it'll become the ocean. Yeah, right. So I think that's one thing is not making things out of plastic. Another thing is the buying less. And how do we detach ourselves from this idea that we're more presentable when we buy the new $70 dress every month. That's gonna be out of fashion in a year. Exactly. And how do we even tackle that problem? The planned obsolescence that the fashion industry engineers so that we have to keep buying clothes. And that's all social norms and social change. And so it's this big kind of ambiguous cloud, it seems. And it's also not. If you look at what marketing does, Doug McKinsey Moore talks a lot about this in community-based social marketing. How do you apply the ideas that advertisers use to sell us things back to ourselves to sell ourselves a different way of living? A sustainable way of living. Yeah, I love that. Social norms, they can change so quickly, like at first it's slow, but it will change so quickly. So I think that's why I love just telling people, do what you have to do to be part of the solution even if you're alone, because soon you won't be alone. Exactly. Because things change so fast. As long as you're being intentional, you're gonna be an influencer. And I see that happening right now for sure. We have a few minutes left, so I wanna cover what, if you had a lot of money, like hundreds of millions of dollars or a big chunk of money, where would you allocate it to solve this problem? Advertising, community-based social marketing. So how do we make it cool to thrift? How do we make it cool to only buy natural fibers if we were to tackle the fashion issue? I would also do reusable take-out container programs all over Honolulu. Everywhere, yeah. Everywhere. Ooh, I don't know, there's a lot to think about. We have a lot of money left. Yeah, let's continue. Carry on. Fund innovation for alternative materials. And also, hey lobbyists, to go into the packaging industry and undo some of the damage that's being done in there, because the plastics industry, the beverage industry, all of those groups spend lots of money ensuring that their products will continue being used. So how could we match that? And these people are getting paid six figures to go in there and do that, where we're working on really limited grant funding to try and get to the same level they are. Yeah, exactly. And I would add to that composting, like creating large-scale composting where everyone can divert all their food waste in organics and just like sequester carbon and grow more food with that. I think that would be an awesome investment. So, last thing, Bill 40's coming up. So can you just talk about that and do a little call to action for people? Sure, so Bill 40 is like three-fifths of the way through the city council process of maybe becoming an ordinance in Hawaii and it would help us get rid of single-use plastics. So get rid of much of the rest of plastic bags, styrofoam containers, straws, stir sticks, and plastic utensils. Cups just got added, I'm pretty sure. Cups just got, I'm so excited. It's really exciting. So on October 22nd at the Impact Hub from 5 to 7.30, we're asking people who are interested to come and join us. We'll feed you if you RSVP. So we can talk about strategies for testifying in front of the city council. What I think we've all learned after years of being a part of this movement is some things work and some things don't. So how do we show up and help the city council by offering them the testimony and evidence that they need to get single-use plastics out of here? Yeah, it would be huge. Yeah, and I'm really excited because we've been working on styrofoam for so long and this is gonna tackle so many materials all at once and it would be one of the earliest policies nationwide that does this. So it's gonna be a trend. We've been inspired by other cities to do it, so it's gonna be a trend if we're able to do it and we're pretty optimistic. And the hearing is Thursday, October 24th at 2.30 at Honolulu Hall if people wanna just go direct. But we really wanna bring people together for the strategy meeting. Yeah. Okay, cool, any final words before we close up? Check out our website, zerowasteoahu.org. We have a bunch of information on Bill 40 there and other resources to help you get connected to zero waste in the community. Awesome, yay, thank you for organizing. This is our show, we're here every other Wednesday at one o'clock and we'll be just tackling all kinds of solutions and problems facing our community and kinda bring a lot of more young women into the studio, so thank you for being here. Thank you.