Getting rid of trash is a challenge for every city, small town, and village.
Rural villages don’t have heavy equipment; they don’t have appropriate ground;
by "appropriate ground" I mean places to bury the garbage or material to cover the garbage
with.
The act of burning garbage at low temperatures where it smolders and it smokes for a long
time, that kind of stuff is bad.
Also, the particulate matter, which is the smoke itself, is also a major cancer causing
substance.
If you can smell smoke, you are absorbing particulate matter into your lungs, and that
kind of particulate matter goes deep into your lungs.
This is very bad for elders and children: Elders because their lungs and their immune
systems are on the decline; children because their lungs and immune systems are just building.
The amount of burning going on in village Alaska is rather extensive.
It’s not just a matter of burning it in incinerators, there is a lot of open burning
going on.
Residents will drive into the dump site or the landfill, throw their trash off and actually
light it on fire and drive away.
So, there will be several small fires; there’ll be large fires; there’ll be some controlled
burning; there’ll be uncontrolled burning.
Someone apparently had lit it and it burned for days, like five or six days - straight
days.
Trash contains many things that make dangerous air pollution when burned.
Things like plastic, Styrofoam, PVC, tires, and electronic items.
They’ve been doing it that way for a long time, and the problem is now though, of course,
that the waste stream is changing and so it isn’t the left over caribou hides and wooden
dog sleds and that type of stuff.
Old tires, you know, they will give off that toxic black smoke.
One of the things I’m recommending for controlling the waste stream that goes into the dump sites,
landfills, and into the burn units, is a collection program.
The village appoints a person or hires a person to be the garbage collector that goes around
collects the garbage from the homes,
or they centrally locate dumpsters inside the community and that person then goes around
and collects those dumpsters, swaps them out for empties, however they want to deal with
it.
They then take that to the dump site and it then goes to the appropriate spots.
The lead acid batteries, the computer waste, the things with plug-ins on them; those things
are separated out and put in appropriate places.
The stuff that is what they refer to as "burnable" goes into the burn units.
The landfill operator then lights the fire when it’s most appropriate, monitors the
burn, maintains the burn unit, maintains the dump site, so you have hours of operation
for the dump site.
The land fill operator can also be the collection person so that he spends half a day collecting
garbage and the other half a day dealing with it at the site.
We’ve been at this almost 10+ years. It’s going to be operated by the city. It’s going
to be controlled. It’s going to be fenced. It’s not going to be like this one that
we have.
Choosing where you locate your burn boxes or any burning and when you burn can have
a large effect on reducing air pollution.
Burning should be done as far from people houses and berry picking as possible.
Be aware of wind direction and only burn when the wind is blowing away from the village.
Be sure the weather conditions are best for burning.
The waste should be dry to burn quickly and reduce smoldering.
Landfills are where we pay for the disposal of the garbage. Dumps are where our children
and grand children pay for the disposal of our garbage.