Hawaii’s Greenhouse Gas Sequestration Task Force (GHGSTF) convened with state and nonprofit organizations last week to discuss whether their ongoing projects can dovetail into the Hawaii 2050 Sustainability Plan to combat climate change.

The GHGSTF heard presentations from the Department of Land and Natural Resources (DLNR), Office of Planning and Sustainable Development, and the nonprofits Sustainable Coastlines and Ma’ona Community Garden to determine which efforts could be used to enhance the 2020-2030 portion of the plan.

Heather McMillen, urban and community forester with the DLNR Division of Forestry and Wildlife, said “trees are essential infrastructure for our survival” and should be formally considered infrastructure. She explained that the DLNR created the Citizen Forester Program in 2016, which uses crowdsourcing to identify and log the amount and types of trees in an area by allowing residents to upload information online. Using the town of Kailua as an example, she said the program calculated that the 5,664 trees in the area sequester about 600,000 pounds of carbon, prevent about 5.5 million gallons of water runoff, and reduce heat by 3,155 therms.

“Unlike stop signs and streetlights, trees increase in value over time … Trees cost money to maintain, but for every dollar invested, there is a $3 return, not to mention all the health and wellbeing benefits that are quite difficult to put a dollar value on,” McMillen said.

Recognition of that value is at the heart of the DLNR’s Kaulunani Project, which seeks to increase urban forestry. The project, a collaboration with the U.S. Forest Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, will create an online, public and interactive tree canopy viewer for the entire state in 2022. McMillen said it would “help us be strategic in our tree planting and tree care efforts going forward.” In the last 10 years, Kaulunani has given $3.6 million to 400 community projects and planted 11,164 trees and distributed 90,606 trees.

McMillen said legal red tape often prevents fully utilizing the urban tree canopy, but Hawaii could “unlock public funds and help to leverage private activities as well” by designating trees as infrastructure. She recommended that the state view trees as “a critical technology for adapting to climate change and promoting ecosystem and human resilience.”

Distributed Composting

Rafael Bergstrom, executive director of Sustainable Coastlines Hawaii, spoke about an “in-vessel” composting pilot project. The vessel his team has been testing inserts food and biowaste into a 22-foot-long metal box with a mulching machine and other components to quicken the composting process. The vessel costs $75,000.

Bergstrom said that GHGs released from biogenic sources can pose a significant problem, with biogenic emissions from processing waste into energy releasing CO2 at three times the rate of burning oil and almost on par with burning coal. “Waste energy is not a clean energy by any means,” he said, adding that agricultural land creates an estimated one-third of the surplus carbon in the air.

Bergstrom argued that composting can be a win-win investment. “Composting is a victory for all of the things that we can do to help regenerate our soils to sequester greenhouse gases out of the air and really mitigates some of our other sources of GHGs, whether that be from landfilling, or burning, and when we put food waste into landfills for instance, the release of methane.”

“Even on Oahu, where we have a waste energy plant, there are huge issues with us burning food waste and green waste in general. Thirty percent of what is going to H-Power [a waste energy recovery plant on Oahu] is both food waste and green waste, which to be frank, is just a waste,” he said.

Bergstrom explained that a single vessel can compost 300,000 pounds of waste and sequester 25 to 150 tons of CO2 per year. Compared with traditional forms of composting, “what could take two to three months in piles can be advanced in two weeks … This is a single project that really has amazing potential to scale.”

Bergstrom argued for a more efficient permitting process, saying, it took more than 200 hours of work to get a permit into the Department of Health. “So smaller scale composting really does need some amendments to help move these things forward faster.”

“Have these machines in every university, every school, every prison, every hotel, every farm, every community garden, and it decentralizes the system to the point where we don’t have a huge investment into a massive composting facility in the middle of the island where there are all sorts of transport costs,” Bergstrom said.

Chantal Chung, project manager with Ma’ona Community Garden, presented the organization’s efforts with vermicomposting, composting using worms. She said that Hawaii is inefficiently “shipping out cardboard and other things [as trash] that we can use to build our soils.”

Chung said that between May 2020 and May 2021, the garden processed more than 140,000 pounds of cardboard, paper and food waste, turning it into usable soil. Although vermicomposting may seem like an easy process, Chung said, “disabling policies and laws on the state and county levels” — along with a lack of infrastructure — create significant roadblocks. She argued for better education for businesses on how to properly set up composting practices and said the state should invest in composting infrastructure to make it easier for businesses and communities to get involved.

Danielle Bass, state sustainability coordinator and head of the statewide sustainability program with the Office of Planning and Sustainable Development, wrapped up the meeting by explaining the 2020-2030 portion of the Hawaii 2050 Sustainability Plan.

The plan shares a “common framework” with the sustainable development goals of the United Nations, Bass said.

Plan developers surveyed the public to better understand residents’ desires for the decade, concluding that they want an economy that is less focused on tourism, more diversified, rebuilds from the pandemic more sustainably and increases Hawaii’s self-sufficiency.

Though the plan is only a recommendation to state officials and businesses, Bass said she is confident that the more momentum that can be built for sustainability, the easier it will be to pass laws benefiting the environment.