 Howard Wigg, Code Green, and I'm with the Hawaii State Energy Office, and we have a distinguished member of the Environmental Committee or community with us today, Steve Joseph, CEO of PVT Landfill Company. Now I was deeply involved in recycling many, many years ago and at that time 8% of all of Oahu's waste was recycled. We are now getting close to 80% and a large, large portion of that is due to Mr. Joseph and all his efforts with PVT Land Company since 1989. He's been at it nonstop improving each and every year as you will see. So welcome to the program Mr. Joseph. This is indeed a huge honor. You are an environmental hero. Thank you. It's great to have you on board and without further ado, let's bring up the first slide and get right into PVT Landfill. Yeah, we're the largest recycler in the islands. We recycled last year 179,000 tons. So we're essentially we're the most isolated island chain anywhere in the world when the largest population and over a million. So it's really important that we do a lot of recycling on things and we handle all the construction demolition debris on the island and we're also responsible for if there's a tsunami, an earthquake, a hurricane, most of the material that gets blown down in a situation like that would come to us. So we're about 400 acres in Nanakuli. We're the one of the largest private employers on that side of the island with over 80 employees and we do a lot of recycling. We'll recycle wood, metal. It'll show up in the slides we've got coming. Yeah, I got a lot of questions, but let's bring up the next slide and you can move right into it. So we've got 80 employees and that's our recycle line and most of our employees are from the west side of the island, which is an area that has historically high unemployment and the other nice thing for our employees it's a short drive to work instead of having to fight the traffic all the way in town. And let me guess they make just a shade over a minimum wage and have a little bit in the way of benefits? No, not hardly. They have all of them have a four-away okay full medical. We pay right at operators wages in there so actually if the union wanted to come in our employees would have to take a pay cut and we've for a number of years given bonuses to all the employees depending on how things are going so they like the bonuses and again most of the people on the Waianae Coast have to make that huge commute into Honolulu. These guys it's right in their backyard. It's right in their backyard short commute to work because you're right that that drive is can be an hour and a half drive. Yes, so yeah you're doing I would say that just based on that you're a great great community member. This is a way capitalism should work in my totally unbiased opinion and up above if we could bring that slide back you refer to a piece of machinery that what is that thing? That's our sort line. I've got another picture of it later on here that shows them when they're picking maybe the next one. Okay let's move to the next. Oh yeah this is our what's happening with leads this is the environmental one that where you can get platinum gold silver so depending on how much material you recycle out of any construction project this is how your green building code gets determined whether you make it and you can pick up two to four percent two to four points for the amount of recycling you can do and you can see in this diagram the amount of recycling for lead credit is going up tremendously. And let me point out that lead stands for leadership in energy and environmental design. It's a voluntary program undertaken by well both by government entities and by the private sector a lot of wakey key hotels I know for instance voluntarily participate in lead and I guess this credit would go to whom the the building the builder or the whoever is building the project out and it's very prestigious and generally when you're in a lead building the rents are higher and the occupancy rates are higher it's a real feather environmental feather in your cap when you are a good lead participant. Yeah because it means you're doing everything right including your amount of power you're using a lot of times the windows will be double paying how you're doing everything in the building including in our case the construction of it. So what we did because when this started out years ago the big problem for any of the projects on on our island is that the footprint where you're going to build this is really small so it's really hard to have five or six different bins out there even Disney who built a very large project had trouble and they had a big footprint with bins and then the problem is everybody here isn't used to putting certain things in a certain bin so the problem was they had to have somebody sit out there to make sure the metal went in the right bin that the wood went into the right bin so what finally happened is we told them you just put everything in one bin we'll sort it out for you and then we'll tell you how much of each type of material got recycled so it became very easy for them to do. Now why didn't this material just go to H power or garbage the energy plant? That doesn't qualify for lead credit on it so it's kind of things we do the amount of metal recycling and then the wood which goes out either for gasification to make power or hydrogen or fuel or goes out for anaerobic digestion and that in turn can make gas for the gas company I know BYU on the east side of the island has got some projects they're working on as well. So this is a much higher and better use of this material than just tossing it into the H power furnace and making electricity with it. Yeah that's the problem the lead won't give you credit for that and this will qualify for credit. Wow that is impressive you're gonna make hydrogen and all kinds of gasses you can make methane you can make different types of gasses and that can be converted over to actually a liquid fuel or it can be used hydrogen is really the thing that on the island we're short of because the refinery needs it because almost everything requires hydrogen that's the one thing they're short of and then for the gas company anaerobic digestion produces a very large amount of methane which is the gas they want for us to be able to use when you turn on the gas. That is really really remarkable well let's go to the next slide please. This keeps getting better and better here. Yeah we got the excellence in landfill management award from SWANA. SWANA is the solid waste association in North America so we got the gold which is the top award we got two silvers one in recycling the other one had no special waste so and I think there's two or three more that we're going to be able to get. This is national this is not not just Hawaii did you actually travel to somewhere to receive the awards yeah we were in Nashville to receive it and this happened right before Lane was due to come in so we flew back for Lane and got here just before it came in and because we're part of the Dereep Berge management part of the island that's right so the city has DRC which is their management company comes in to handle the debris essentially the city and city employees are going to be working to get infrastructure back up they don't won't have the people to do the cleanup for roads and hauling out a lot of the debris that gets scattered all over the place so their management team coordinates with truckers equipment operators and us to make sure we're all set to go that everybody knows what they need to do and then in order to get paid by FEMA you have to make sure you have all the paperwork and so their debris management company make sure that the city gets paid and then in turn the city pays us yeah and FEMA is a national organization federal energy management agency and I happen to know from other tales they are really really strict on the paperwork yeah so you have to have paperwork guys right on the site there yeah and their main goal is to make sure that the breach doesn't just get landfill their goal is to make sure that as much as possible gets recycled which is a really good goal I know you and I care about that so you in post-emergency or post-disaster you would just get truckload after truckload after truckload of stuff coming in there and we could if we got hit I also was on the disaster planning committee back in 06 and we could from a category four we could get 430,000 tons of debris overnight literally if we got hit with the category four this would just be a care of non-stop caravan of trucks coming in yeah the cleanup would just be massive and it would be mostly fallen trees that have been cut up or it'll be trees houses everything else the things that would go to wyman oligulcher h power would be organic kinds of things an animal that got killed something else that would be what you would call municipal solid waste and we'd handle any of the debris and I mean it can be anything from solar panels to whatever gets blown off roofing material you can't begin to tell you the amount of stuff that can end up flying can imagine yeah when lane came in we got hit with 80 mile an hour winds on our side of the island and it ripped 15 solar panels off of our solar array out there and drove one of them right through a pickup truck door so I mean you do not want to be out in an 80 mile an hour wind and that'll teach you in the future to really really bolt down those solar panels we just gone through and reinforced them yeah oh wow it actually it actually sucked a window out of our van the square windows that are in the doors the window wasn't inside and it wasn't on the ground it was just gone it had sucked it right out of the van we have no idea where it went that's a lot of pressure building up there yeah let's let's go to the next slide this is keeps getting better and better here so this is what you receive yeah this is the kind of material we get 330 000 tons annually you kind of see the metal the amount of wood concrete so we were con we recycle concrete asphalt any of the wood goes out for feedstock we take in a certain amount of coal ash from the AES and then the metals and then dirt on projects where we've had cleanups from spills or that kind of thing we'll take in all of that dirt because our facility is lined we're approved to handle a lot of stuff what do you do with the coal ash the coal ash actually serves a very useful purpose for it acts as a barrier in there it also acts we put it in when we put in the lining we put in the coal ash because it acts like a drain layer and it doesn't break down so it has the same porosity as beach sand so if you put it out anywhere and it gets hard but it has that kind of porosity so we use it as part of a drain layer in the landfill wow so we use just about everything we can yeah yeah yeah that's so so impressive so we do need to take a break Howard Wigg cold green with Steve Joseph CEO of PVT landfill back in a moment aloha i'm marcia joiner inviting you come visit with us on cannabis chronicles a 10 000 year odyssey where we explore and examine the plant that the muse has given us and stay with us as we explore all the facets of this planet on wednesdays at noon please join us aloha aloha my name is mark schlau I am the host of think tech hawaii's law across the sea law across the sea is on think tech hawaii every other monday at 11 am please join me where my guests talk about law topics and ideas and music and hawaiiana all across the sea from hawaii and back again aloha good afternoon again Howard Wigg cold green and i represent the hawaii state energy office very very distinguished guests with us today steve joseph who i have just learned i elevated in stature he's the vice president not the ceo of pvt landfill but given his legend he is ceo to everybody and everything but the initials in back of him so honored to have you on board here that's the joseph let's go to the next slide each each one is so fascinating oops that's yeah this is a this is a good one shows we have so we put in solar to power our office initially so it powers a big portion of all of our office facility in there but we have plans to put in 1440 panels to power that recycling the part you saw in the back and with the employees in front of it that whole recycling facility we intend to power that with solar too just to kind of take us off the grid one it saves financially the other thing is we don't burden the utility precisely and i notice that a lot of those panels are over parking doors and it gets pretty dang hot out there so those cars are a lot happier in the shade oh they are our employees like they've covered parking a lot and then if you put panels over your regular building you have shaded now the roof of the building so it has virtually zero solar heat gain boom your air conditioning load goes down yep and you are remembering that there are certain tax credits for oh yes yes yes yes wanted to make sure you get in there and uh yeah but our real goal is with this the goal we have to put in 1440 panels is really to power the equipment that we have out there right now which i you know it's a real good goal to being green absolutely absolutely you know irregardless of the credits we get for we think that that's the way to go this would involve your including storage yeah the panels and yeah yes we'd have some battery storage in there so right now our whole switching equipment is all set to take it though it did take me two years to get a permit and get it installed but it has the ability to turn he go off and go strictly on the battery and solar panels when we get them installed well just a good news item we i chair the hawaii building code council and just two meetings ago we adopted the 2017 nec national electrical code which has four chapters on storage so in your application to the city for the storage you just need to say we are complying with 2017 and ec and you're permitting i certainly can't guarantee it but your permitting process should be vastly sped up because this assures the plan checkers that you are specifying and saying the storage facilities properly excellent yeah thank you so on that cherry note let's go to the next slide so we're using solar as well to power some of our equipment on here our groundwater monitoring our leachate collection a lot of things that we do because they're kind of isolated it's away from everything we found that we can power it with solar so we've used it we also have 36 cameras on site and we power a number of those cameras off solar as well because they're isolated in positions where there's no power to what what do you need the cameras for well the cameras we use on site to both protect the site and so that we know what's going on all over the site we have some ptz cameras because we have a lot of copper and people like to come in yes take the copper or the other thing they seem to like is those big deep cycle batteries and the heavy equipment because i guess they make excellent boat batteries so i think we found one of them one time shortly after it left out at winye boat harbor surprise surprise and you mentioned the leachate that's not the subject of much cocktail party discussion what the world is leachate but leachate is the water that moves through the trash and then gets collected in the liner portion and somebody asked me one time how would we know if anything leaked out and i told him i said if groundwater suddenly improved because our leachate is cleaner than the groundwater underlying the site because when it comes through we don't have anything that adds bad things to it so it comes through it starts out as rain water and it ends up in the bottom is slightly affected rain water and you basically just put it in these containers and it evaporates no we use it because it's so clean we use it and have approved from the state to use it for dust control on site so and then as the landfill has built up and as we close parts of it then there actually won't be any leachate because the rain doesn't get through on it and we don't have anything in the waste that actually generates water you know water generally from the breakdown of organics and the closest thing we have to organics is wood and it basically doesn't break down yep yep let's go to the next slide so this is we put almost four million dollars in our recycling equipment that's the upper photo and the bottom one so we get about 2000 tons of trash a day and a roughly 80 percent of that gets recycled goes through our equipment the other thing we're recycling is we're digging up four million cubic yards out of the old landfill the oldest part and recycling it as well because all the wood in there which makes up almost 50 or 60 percent of the material can go out for power generation or to make gas for the gas company or anything like that so you are actually decreasing the volume of waste that sits under Oahu soil yes we are it's getting recycled and rather crucial since we just happened to be on an island yeah it's isolated and people ask me they go do you think you'd ever dig it up again well if there was something in there that suddenly was worth doing it we'd probably dig it up again and sensing equipment is getting so good that you could put some kind of a vibration down there and say that's well I guess you recycle the metal so that wouldn't be metal under there but that's this material that's this material that's this material yeah because the things that get end up going into the landfill are things like carpeting and wood shingles off your roof for the tar paper because nobody wants to take those currently and you know drywall the jet board nobody wants to take that currently so it's you know literally 80 percent we can able to recycle beautiful and that cherry note let's go to the next slide oh this is part of our operations this is a four-year project that we're working on now which is going to take four million cubic yards and recycle it out so I mean this has been a project and the most of it's going to be the wood that goes out for energy production we had a lot of concrete that gets crushed and reused now how can crushed crushed concrete be reused oh you'll love this when we use it for the roads on site and for a lot of other applications but one of the things that it's useful for any place where you can't make a ground penetration for a solar panel um the what you can do is you put together essentially it's an expanded metal box fill it with recycled concrete and then mount the solar panels on top of it and that way you can put it on the ground and you don't do a ground penetration what would be wrong with the ground penetration well like for us on our landfill the way the our all of our requirements read we can't do a ground penetration through the top deck when we're done so it's it's got a final cap on it so this way we can mount all those solar panels on portions of the landfill we've closed without doing a ground penetration how could you sell some of the crushed concrete either to the state or the city for for their building roads or yes yeah that is also one of the applications I mean basically the the way we work we try and not compete with our customers and guys like west wahoo and a number of other ones great specific crushing concrete for reuse in different areas so point yeah we're actually looking at markets and putting it into markets that they don't currently handle and can't so you know our philosophy always is there's room for everybody to make a living on the island and that's kind of the basic on how we work and can you crush it to any size the customer might need to six inch blocks two inch blocks smaller than that to everything including sand size so it depends on what they want normally somewhere around the four to six inch crush allows you to get all the rebar out which then gets recycled out for metal mm-hmm that normally is an optimum for getting rebar out and rebar makes pretty good metal oh yeah my look yeah yeah let's look at the next slide oh yeah this is some of the stuff we do we have drones that we fly on the landfill we use it for monitoring the landfill both to see how our fill is going in and also to make sure that we don't develop a hot spot anywhere in there so even even the fire department because that's one of the problems they've had with fires like the fire they had mocha kilo the areas that are so isolated like that it's hard to identify residual hot spots after the fire and then what happened up mocha kilo it kept blowing up again because of the wind so with something like the drone and they you know they wanted to come out and take a look at how we're doing with it that would allow them to be real specific to get those spots that you know you don't see right away you come over with an infrared camera and you can see them we have got a very short time is there one last slide left oh this is this is the heavy equipment we have the first and only electric bulldozer on the islands and so it uses about half the diesel and it will push as much as a larger bulldozer will so the ease of operation the fact that really electric this has more power than a bigger machine so it really works well and then we have a compactor which is gps controlled so that it can set the blade to push out at a certain thickness and then it runs over it and by looking at the screen they can tell how many times they ran over it so they got to make three passes on it before you're doing too much do you're not doing enough wow oh well we had more to cover but the all good things must come to an end thank you so much mr. joseph almost ceo of pvt landfill this has been very fascinating and you definitely fulfilled my expectations that i don't think anybody any single entity is doing as much for the environment as pvt landfill it's an honor to have you here this is howard wigg code green state energy office see you next time