Paper short abstract:

This paper challenges the municipal-corporate narrative of waste-to-energy (WTE) as the epitome of sustainable waste management for Honolulu. This narrative undermines alternative management approaches and silences the contested nature of the impacts of WTE's greenhouse gas and pollution emissions.

Paper long abstract:

The City and County of Honolulu (the City) claims adherence to the waste management hierarchy, which positions waste reduction as the least pollutive and most effective strategy for managing waste and minimizing pollution. Source reduction is an upstream management strategy that precludes the generation of trash. In contradiction to this claim, the City invested in a technocratic management regime called waste-to-energy (WTE), a reactive strategy which incinerates waste to generate electricity in a facility called H-POWER. This paper explores the material and discursive tensions of the City's claim to value source reduction while prioritizing management through H-POWER, an approach which encourages waste production by contractually requiring the City to produce 800,000 tons of trash annually or pay a fine. This put-or-pay contract is held between the City and Covanta—the corporation that operates H-POWER.

Situated in a critical discard studies and STS approach, this work attempts a multi-sited ethnography of infrastructure to unpack the narrative used by the City and Covanta to create WTE-as-sustainable through claims to meet the island's "clean" energy needs and landfill diversion goals. This paper employs critical discourse analysis to highlight where ideological work is at play and simultaneously uncovers ways in which this discourse suppresses source reduction as a viable alternative. I argue that neoliberal ideology underlies Honolulu's waste-as-commodity approach. The Zero Waste movement contests WTE-as-sustainability based on the emissions implications of encouraging upstream production of goods for trash-fuel and based on the material consequences to human and environmental health from incinerating waste.