 Aloha, owingala. This is Kaui Lukas, host of Hawaii is My Main Land every Friday at 3 p.m., trying hard to keep it on the bright side and off the grid. Today we're trying really hard because we're going to discuss the calculated demise of Senate Bill 1109, this week which would have prohibited the use of polystyrene foam containers by food vendors, unless the Department of Health gives an exemption or the county already has one. With me to discuss this today is Jennifer Millholland, the waste reduction coordinator of Kokua Hawaii Foundation and she's also the president of Styrophobia. And happy girl's day Jennifer! Thank you, I appreciate it. So it's hard to be cheery today. There were so many people that were really excited about SB 1109 and that's where that's why you're here is because I ran into you at the Capitol and you were there with a lot of people. Talk about this bill, what it said and what we've lost. Okay, so SB 1109 came about, this is not the first time that a foam prohibition bill has been introduced at the state level. Bills have been introduced since 2008 but this is actually the first time that a bill of this kind prohibiting food vendors from distributing expanded polystyrene foam containers. This is the first time it's gotten a hearing since 2008 so just that alone is pretty monumental. Basically what the bill says is that any food vendors which also covers caterers and hospitals but generally generally food vendors that you see your characteristic foam clam shells they're not allowed to use EPS foam which is basically expanded polystyrene foam. This type of styrofoam is the most common name for it. What it says is it's it's patterned after San Francisco's bill. They have prohibited styrofoam distribution. How long ago? How long is that billed in? I'm not sure actually but it's been at least a few years and they've had a lot of success with it but it's patterned after theirs and what's special about theirs is that they allow, there's an exemptions if a county decides to do its own recycling program. This is a little confusing for a lot of people they're like why are we even allowing an exemption for foam recycling? The reason is that a lot of opponents of foam bands say it's too extreme so let's talk about recycling litter management first so this allows for exemptions if counties decide they want to put together a foam recycling program. So that would be a specific recycling program just for it would be another bin in other words somewhere or how would that work? It would be totally up to the counties so it's just allowing it's allowing counties their other flexibility if they decided to set it up. Now granted it's not likely that a county would decide to do that because it's very cost prohibitive to recycle foam because you can't recycle foam unless it's virgin so if it's got any kind of food on it any kind of staining you can't recycle it. So it's one of those things that we want to allow for flexibility in the bill but most likely the ban across the board would be the most effective. So it's a practical matter it's not recyclable. That's correct and worldwide you're looking at less than 1% actually gets recycled and that's usually packing peanuts because they have nothing no food on them. So there's nowhere to go with this material except to burn it really. On a wahoo that's right we burn it. Other counties that goes to landfill. Okay but there are speaking of the counties let's let's keep going on that. Sure. We do have some bright news. Tell us about that. Yes even though SB 1109 is technically deferred it wasn't scheduled in time there are still other foam prohibition measures going on in other counties. So Maui unfortunately is a little nebulous it passed the first reading end of last year and has yet to be scheduled for a second reading in front of the county council hearing. You know we've talked to them about that it's still kind of up in the air what they want to do with it there's not a lot of clear answers as to what's going on but effectively it's in limbo. So we need to still need to be scheduled or sent back to a committee. But Big Island however has resurrected one of their foam restriction bans bill 13 and is actually coming up for its second reading on the 8th of March. Now I'm not sure about the other counties would does that have to go through three readings or. As far as I know yeah unless unless it's sent back to a committee with a revision. So here SB 1109 when I saw you at the Capitol I think we have a picture of it there was an article in the advertiser because there were just crowds of and lots of students it was beautiful it was just really heartwarming to see all these kids show up. It was amazing to we had three separate groups of students that had that had shown up that had had wanted to be a part of it wanted to to discuss their their part in the future and wanting not want to see foam out there. Just when I saw you actually didn't even get to go in and testify because it was standing room only it was packed people couldn't even get into the room. So I didn't even get to testify that day. But what we're looking at was estimates around 100 people showed up that day and that is I can't even say enough how amazing that is because 100 people showing up in the middle of the week in the middle of a day during a work week is is amazing. And that just shows how things are changing in terms of the level of engagement in these processes. And those who couldn't show up in the middle of the day and on a work day a lot of them submitted testimony to there was there were hundreds of people who so over 600 yeah over 600 that's that is that's incredible. So there it made it through the first committee and it died in the second committee. Actually it was never scheduled for the second committee. That's effectively what happens in in the way our system is set up if once it passes through a committee and it's it's the next committee that it's it's slated to be heard in the chair of that committee or joint chair in this case. They have full discretion whether or not or not to even hear the bill. So what happened in this case is the joint chairs Senator Takuta and Baker Senator Rosalind Baker Senator Rosalind Baker they decided not to schedule it for hearing so it didn't even get a full public discourse to discuss it. Even though lots of us were submitting online testimony and calling their offices to say please schedule this. So it's not it's not it's not a slam dunk even if you have hundreds of people and it's basically a really good bill. Although clearly somebody thinks it isn't. So we'll get into that a little bit. But I wanted to give a shout out to the senators Will Ispero and Carl Rhodes and Miley Shimabukuro because they're the ones that introduced this bill. And thank you thank you thank you and let's let's try again next year. And maybe we'll have 30 schools instead of three schools. With your work at Kokua Hawaii Foundation. So they work a lot with schools absolutely and they have a specific program. Plastic Free Hawaii Plastic Free Hawaii. There's also three hours recycling program and in schools and a lot of there's a lot of the components throughout all those programs that that touch on waste reduction. OK. So waste reduction is is kind of the hat you're wearing there. But you're also as president of Styrophobia you know a lot about alternatives. Right. I sure hope so. So for people who don't know what Styrophobia is why don't you give us a little. Well Styrophobia originally started out as a for profit entity. It was one of the original companies in Hawaii that was selling alternatives to to Styrofoam. So if you guys are probably seeing composable clamshells the like the brown colored ones are typically made out of byproduct like wheat straw or sugarcane. So basically they were retailing composable products. But recently in the last three years you know we got together and we decided that it would be a lot more effective as a nonprofit doing education doing research doing advocacy. So we transition it into a nonprofit. And so the goal here is to ban styrene polystyrene and replace it with a compostable product. Ideally composable. Well sit let me rephrase that. Typically it's referred to as compostable or recyclable. Personally we try not to advocate for anything disposable to begin with. So we get having reusable only is the ultimate goal. But we know that that's not entirely practical practical right off the bat. So that's why we advocate for composable products because right from the beginning upstream composable products are non toxic and they don't you know they don't cause damage to cause harm to the workers that are that are creating them. And if they get if they do get in the environment as litter they're not going to attract other toxins and so this would be a good time to reiterate the difference between biodegradable and compostable. Sure. Thank you for bringing that up. That is a really really common source of confusion. I think everyone has probably seen the plastic bags that say biodegradable. They have pictures of a tree. You know it's a very sunny bright image like eco friendly. You can do it biodegradable. But what's what's happening is with that definition is that there's the first thing you have to know is that there's the colloquial usage that common like if you ask the average person on the street what do they think it means then there's the industrial definition the legal definition of what something can be called biodegradable as if you ask the average person on the street what biodegradable means they think if I toss it on the side of the road after seven days it'll disappear into nothing toxic won't even see it. But if you look at the actual legal business definition of biodegradable it says must break down and become indistinguishable in the soil. There's no timeframe. There's no requirements for whether or not it can be toxic free. There's basically no parameters on on what has to happen. It just has to disappear. So what effectively happens in those biodegradable products they're not breaking the law because by industry definition they are biodegradable. What's happening is up anywhere up to 97% plastic is being mixed in with corn resin. So what happens is it gets out there into the world and bacteria start to eat the corn. So instead of one plastic bag in the ocean you have thousands. It's impossible to know how it that's how we get those microplastics. Right. That's that's a big part of it. Interesting. It degrades it photo degrades it doesn't biodegrade. So it's it's actually really fast it's fascinating. So actually avoid this by those bags labeled biodegradable or the products label biodegradable because they're worse for the environment than just a regular plastic bag. Okay. Thanks for clarifying. Okay. And then just as a what would timeframe be for a compostable container. If you so actually the companies that manufacture the compostable products especially if it's a compostable plastic they actually don't recommend that you just put it in your backyard composting because for it to break down it requires a certain temperature and it requires a certain amount of aeration. So it typically doesn't happen in a backyard composer. But if you go to an industrial like a large scale composting facility usually an in vessel system it's contained has air forced into it it's turned a lot. You're looking at I believe 90 days. Okay. So and I had on my show a guy from Lebanon who invented a process that can shorten that 90 days to 10. So wouldn't it be cool if we had one of those here. That'd be amazing. So how long if it's left to its own to present state. If I go to L and L and get my beloved ginger chicken and it comes in that hateful Styrofoam box. How long is that Styrofoam box going to last going to exist. So it's in its in its primary form the whole box it's it's probably will break down within a week it'll disappear in a week what's going to happen is it breaks down to these tiny little pieces but the plastics themselves never disappear. In fact I don't know if you've heard this within the last week or so they've they found plastics residue plastics at the bottom of the Mariana's trench seven miles deep. So plastic is persisting and it's not going away. Thank you for bringing me I was driving into to work the morning when that happened and I yeah it's deeply affecting and on that note we're going to take a one minute base to recover ourselves and talk some more about this. OK. Aloha my name is John White and I actually had a small part to do with what's happening today served actually in public office. But if you don't already know that here's a chance to learn more about what's happening in our state by joining me for a talk story with John White every other Monday. Thank you and I look forward to your seeing us in the future. I've got the Beagle sisters here with a healthy tip. We encourage you to enjoy the food you eat this holiday season and keep it local and healthy. Yeah eat the rainbow rainbow and if you need any produce come to the Red Barn on the North Shore. Welcome back to Hawaii is my mainland. I'm Kaui Lucas and with me today is Jennifer Milholland who is with Kokua Hawaii Foundation and styrophobia and we are mourning the demise of Senate Bill 1109 this week which would have made it really hard for but not impossible to sell food in styrofoam containers. OK so Jennifer you were just talking about that story that came out last week seven miles down in the Marianas trench. What was that what was that substance that they found down there. BPA this phenol is commonly used in plastics. OK in the United States we haven't been able to use it for since the 80s. So that stuff has been around for a really long time. And it's going to be a hormone disruptor so nasty stuff. Nasty stuff. OK and here in Hawaii with so much coastline and so much water around us that seems to attract plastic like a magnet. It's just quite amazing. You gave us a video. Let's look at that that shows some of the effects that that plastic has in our immediate environment here. I'm going to try just to catch some of this. It looks like confetti. I'm going to use this sieve and just catch what I could here like that. Look at this. It's all pieces of micro plastic. It's washed up shore here the ocean works like a blender and it's blending the plastic down to these smaller pieces. It's fragments fragments that are available in the food chain in the future and never saw anything like it already in 10 years. The amount of plastic in the oceans it will double. And in 2050 there will be four times this amount in the water. I think that's pretty frightening. OK so what are some of the alternatives and why aren't we using them? Well, if you can look at it wearing the other hat a little bit. Well, like we've already mentioned, there are compostable alternatives. So it's all products are in the same form, the same mold. Every distributor on the island carries some form of, I should just say virtually every distributor on the island carries some form of compostable product. They also carry products in the same molds that are in Styrofoam, but they're recyclable plastics. And when I say recyclable, I mean recyclable in Hawaii. So ones and twos. So there's definitely there is a wide range of products available to vendors. I would say the reason we're not using them, there's multiple reasons. The most common is that business claim that they're too expensive. So what happens with that is typically we'll see that products that are not foam. Foam is very, very cheap and very ubiquitous. So you will see that typically alternative products will cost a little bit more, but there are multiple cases where they cost less or they cost the same. So we cannot say absolutely that they're always going to cost more. So cost concern is one reason. And you know, vendors talk to each other. They just like, oh no, it's too expensive. So here's say as part of it. Do you have any sense of who or how many restaurants or food establishments are now using compostable products? Do you have a sense of the market share in any way? Absolutely. And we know in Hawaii, there are over 130 restaurants that are voluntarily foam free. So that that means they're okay. So they're choosing not to use foam without a mandate in place, without a ban in place. Does this include like takeout restaurants? Absolutely. Wow, that's great. There's a wide number of restaurants that have chosen or food vendors that choose not to use foam, whether or not for environmental reasons or because they found it cheaper or because they found it at the same price or demand from their customers. So we know then that it is possible to use compostable products and not go under. It is absolutely possible. And that's what we see a lot. In fact, the objections to a lot of these bills that come up are, the main objections are the trade associations, the Hawaii restaurants associations, chemistry councils. What they continue to claim is that it's a lot of speculation basically. A lot of the bills die from speculation, basically saying. Speculation about, basically what happens is you see a lot in hearings industry or lobbies will come in and say, if you do this, businesses will fail. If you do this, businesses will go under. They won't be able to make any money. So there's a lot of fear basically created about if you do this, you'll be anti-business. You will put businesses down. And we know that that is just untrue in this case. We know it from local examples and we know it from national examples. We know it from global examples. For example, in San Jose. So California has multiple counties that are foam free. So what happened was San Jose, following their own foam prohibition from their own chamber of commerce said, they're like, this is gonna hurt businesses. It's gonna hurt businesses. It's gonna put them under. So following their passage of their foam free bill, what they did was they did an investigation. They looked at 28 counties that were over 80,000 in population. And they investigated and they found not one single instance of negative economic impact to businesses. Okay, 28 different counties in the San Jose area. Oh, in California. In California, spread all over the place that have chosen not to have foam. They have foam free bands. Yeah, so none of the vendors in those counties can. And so what they're, they're like, we wanna know. Like, is this actually impacting businesses or businesses going under? And they found not one single instance. And locally we're seeing that it's not in the case because as you mentioned, that we know of over 130 restaurants in the minimum. That's just the ones we found since we started looking that are foam free voluntarily. And not only are they not going under, but they're thriving. So just the implication, the speculation that businesses will go under is false. Well, I was surprised when I went to Nicos at the Pier 38 there. And they wanted 25 cents for a compostable container. And I thought, well, okay, I'm gonna walk the talk here. I'm gonna pay 25 cents to just to make the point that, you know, I mean, what is that? That's 15 minutes in a parking meter. But I was kind of shocked. It's like, can it really be that much more for a compostable container? It does not typically cost the vendor 25 cents, no. What vendors will choose to do is they will, if they decide to pass on the cost to their consumers, they will make a nice round even number. They don't wanna charge the eight cents or the 10 cents extra, because it just doesn't look as good. So when vendors are actually charging you 25 cents, it is more than likely that they're making money off of that. Okay, well, but if I could use that opportunity to make a point, so the average person goes out to eat 100 times a year. So if you decide that as a person that wants to support compostable alternatives, you wanna pay that 25 cents per time. You're looking at twice a week, every week. So what you end up paying over the course of a year is $25. And so you can ask yourself, or they can ask you basically, over the course of the year, is $25 worth protecting our environment? And most people would say yes. Protecting our environment. And really our environment and the animals, it's, you sent me some pictures. Well, I'm gonna look away, so. But we have to see that. We have to take that in. We have to know that when we choose styrofoam, we are choosing to harm living beings that are defenseless and don't have a choice. Effectively, yes. Right, they can't help it, right? They're just, it's swimming in there, it's their air. Oftentimes it gets confused for food. It's when animals ingest these, they don't realize they're eating plastic. They're not choosing to eat plastic. They think that it's, in this case with the turtles, like they tend to think the plastic bags are jellyfish. Fish think that they're just eating a piece of coral maybe. And it amplifies in the environment. So one piece of plastic, it's a piece of oil. It's one little piece of toxin, but a lot of toxins are hydrophobic. So they wanna get away from water, so they'll cling to the nearest piece of plastic. So it's an amplification. So by the time it gets back into our fish that we're eating, it's 15, 20 times more toxic than it was when it first went into the ocean. And this picture here just breaks my heart, 100 plastic bags in that one wheel. Right, and this is, I think these pictures are very hard to see, obviously, but they definitely kind of exemplify the choice that we're making, because it really is a choice. We're deciding that our convenience culture is more important than the impacts they're having on these animals and our environment. And I really don't think that it's just the mom and pop shops. I mean, you've mentioned their large chains and involved. And so making people responsible. I mean, I think if people really saw the direct connection between do I want to cause tumors in the beloved Honu because I chose to stop at 7-Eleven and get a cup of coffee. Yeah, and what you see, a lot of the objections are, like we don't need to focus on bands, we need to focus on litter, we need to focus on recycling. And the problem with that is that it puts the, it puts the onus or responsibility off of those that are choosing to distribute it and puts it on human behavior. And anyone that's ever tried to change human behavior knows that it is damn near impossible and it will take years. So basically what's happening is we have a situation that's so urgent in terms of the impacts of plastic pollution that we need to do something that's more proactive. We need to remove this substance. We need to take it out of circulation. And we focus on foam, specifically out of all other plastics because it's because of the impact it has. It's one of the most known toxics, highest, most toxic that we know of, and it just breaks apart. And I was really happy to see that, doing a little researcher on the show, the mecca of our consumer culture here, Costco, even has compostable clamshells now. They do. It's from WorldCentric. They're an awesome company. They create, they manufacture the compostable products. And if you actually compare, so they sell the styrofoam trays right next to the, the WorldCentric compostable clamshells and the difference between them is $4 for a case of 100. So that comes down to a four cents extra. And that's cheaper than the distributors can get it. So if you're a vendor in Maui, go. Okay, can you repeat that again slowly, please? Sorry about that. I get excited. Yeah. So the difference in cost is for a case of 100 is $4. A case of 100 compostable at Costco clamshells. Not as, that's for nine inch clamshells. Nine inch clamshells, which most take out places use. Correct. Is $4 more than the styrofoam. Correct. And it breaks down to about four cents extra per. You know, it's indefensible. Just really indefensible. Yeah, because if you break it down, if you say a restaurant serves 100 covers, that basically just means 100 meals. You know, you're looking at $4 extra a day, you know. And the idea that that could break someone, I think is indefensible, you can't, you can't make that argument. I love that study in California. Hopefully, when the bill comes around again next year, that kind of argument, I mean, I assume that you guys submitted testimony on that. We did, absolutely. And all of the objections to the phone bill can be combated. They are confronted, I guess. But without the chance to have the discourse on it, public discourse on the record, we can't make those. All the deals get made behind doors. Thank you, Jennifer. Okay, so we have our mandate for next year. We're going to save our marine life and our beaches and our water and make sure that we are not using styrofoam anymore.