Yakutat’s dump was out of state compliance for decades, attracting bears at all hours. Through new staff, a 1% sales tax, and grant money from the Yakutat Tlingit Tribe, the city now operates one of the tidiest dumps in the state without barging their trash off-site. (Emily Kwong/KCAW photo)

As far as dump make-overs go, Yakutat has the ultimate Cinderella story. The remote fishing community is hundreds of miles from any other city. Barging trash away is too expensive. So, as the dump filled to the brim, what was Yakutat to do? As part of Coast Alaska’s series “Talking Trash,” KCAW reports on how one community turned its solid waste situation around.

Downloadable audio.

There was a time when dumping your trash in Yakutat meant dodging bears.

Kris Widdows describes it as part of the evening’s entertainment. “You’d come out to the dump at night and watch the bears get in the garbage. It was like going to the movies,” she says, a movie where a burning pit of garbage became a watering hole for bears.

Locals and visitors alike would pull their cars up to the edge and toss everything — their plastic bottles and dirty diapers, food scraps and oil — into the same pile. The town bears would feast.

Into the future, Yakutat will have to contend with scrap metal, E-waste, and tires that continue to accumulate in the landfill. The city recently spent $17,000 to recycle E-Waste in Seattle. Alaska Marine Lines shipped it for free. (Emily Kwong/KCAW photo)

Widdows, who helped form Yakutat’s solid waste committee, remembers one encounter in particular. “We were out here watching the bears and had one climb in the back of our pick-up truck looking for garbage looking for garbage. That was common,” she says.

This is how it was in Yakutat for decades. The Department of Environmental Conservation wasn’t happy, but the city didn’t have the necessary funds to bring the dump into compliance.

With federal grant money through the Yakutat Tlingit Tribe that started to change in 2006. Widdows recalls how tribal environmental officers Maryann Porter and Violet Sensmeier worked with concerned citizens like herself to tidy up the dump. That also meant finding a way to pay for it.

“In villages and small towns like this, everybody has a unique challenge. You can’t send it out and you don’t have as many people to help with the cost,” Widdows says. To bring revenue into the solid waste fund, Yakutat now dedicates 1 percent of its sales tax to the solid waste fund.

This boost, combined with new staff phasing in safer practices, created the award-winning landfill you can see today.

(Truck stalling, load and unloading sounds)

Inside the Yakutat Landfill (Slideshow)

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I step inside a wide open yard. There’s trucks busily sorting trash into piles: one for washers and dryers, one for refrigerators, one for cars, all squished and neatly stacked like Jenga blocks. Everything is marked with a hand painted sign, as if we are inside a trash museum.

Widdows and I are sitting at the bottom of a mountain of giant tires. There are flies circling our heads, but otherwise, it doesn’t smell at all. I can’t help but say, “This is quite a dump.”

KCAW: I just said this quite a dump, but I mean that in a good way!

Widdows: (Haha) That could have come out two ways!

KCAW: How is it not stinky?

Widdows: It doesn’t sit there where the public has access to it. Half an hour and he takes it away.

The “he” in question is manager Aaron Gray, who drives one of the trucks moving boxes into a trench for burning later that night. Widdows tells me he lights the match when certain weather conditions align, so smoke won’t hang in the air.

Wearing a baseball cap and layers of t-shirts, Gray says he’s not a neatfreak person by nature. “I’m just getting paid to do my job and do my work, so that’s what I do. There’s a lot of little things out here to keep you busy.”

When we spoke it was August, with sport fishermen and summertime construction creating more waste for Gray and his team to organize. They have their system down pat. Cardboard is burned daily. Glass is crushed. Recyclables are sorted in marked shipping containers.

Everything is dealt with in-house, except for the occasional shipment. The City and Borough of Yakutat makes money from of batteries and aluminum, but Gray says that’s the only trash of value. “The glass and the cans and the plastics and stuff like that, we don’t make a profit. It’s going to cost us money to send it out,” he adds.

One of the old trucks from the Yakutat Landfill. The city used to have scrap metal picked up for free by the Juneau-based Channel Construction, but that company no longer visits due to the declining price of scrap metal. (Emily Kwong/KCAW photo)

The city recently paid for a decade’s worth of E-waste (electronic waste) to be barged out of Yakutat. Alaska Marine Lines shipped it to Seattle for free, but it still cost $17,000 to recycle.”Particularly where we’re located there’s nothing free,” says City and Borough Manager John Erickson.

Leaning back in his chair, Erickson lays out the challenges for budgeting solid waste removal into the future. He estimates the city will have to dig a new cell for the landfill in five years, a $200,000 cost. Yakutat will also run out of space to house old cars. The city used to get its scrap metal picked by for free by the Juneau-based Channel Construction. With the price of scrap metal in decline, they stopped coming. Yakutat is an expensive trip for a barge.

“We’re 225 miles from Juneau. 220 miles from Cordova. We’re very remote,” Erickson says, lightly knocking his knuckles against the desk. “We just have to wait. Those cars piling up out there at the dump, they’re going to be there a long time I think.”

Yakutat is definitely on the map Sandra Woods, the state landfill inspector for Southeast. When she first came to Yakutat in 2008, she was afraid to get out of the car for the sheer volume of bears. She gave it a failing grade of 44%(080804 inspection). Now, the landfill is close to full compliance with a score of 87% (2017 Inspection Report) and has earned two awards from the Department of Environmental Conservation’s solid waste program for its meteoric improvement.

Woods said it’s people on the ground like Gray who make all the difference. “I just remember meeting him and knowing that he was the one that put this into place,” she told KCAW over the phone. “Yakutat has really changed the way they do things without having to really ship their waste out.”

The Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation awarded Yakutat a silver certificate in 2014 and 2016 for improvements to their solid waste program. (Scan courtesy of DEC)

Household garbage from Sitka, Ketchikan and three other Southeast Alaska cities ends up in the Roosevelt Regional Landfill in Klickitat County, Washington. (Photo by Tom Banse/Northwest News Network)

When you toss a candy wrapper in the trash, you’re sending it on a thousand-mile journey to a Lower 48 landfill. That’s the case if you live in one of five Southeast Alaska communities that send their garbage south via barge, truck and train.

We’ll take you on that trip, beginning in Sitka, as part of the CoastAlaska News series, Talking Trash.

Downloadable audio.

Sitkan Megan Pasternak stands in her kitchen, holding a bag of garbage. So, what’s inside?

“Not much. There’s a couple used paper towels, I hate to admit,” she said. “And some stuff that could be composted because it’s vegetable stuff, but we don’t do that anymore because of the bears around here. And some plastics that I couldn’t recycle and a few odds and ends.”

And does she ever wonder what happens to it after it gets picked up by the trash truck?

“Not really, but I always like garbage day because it goes away from my house and just disappears,” she said, laughing.

Of course, it doesn’t. A garbage truck picks up her trash can, dumps the contents inside and hauls it to a solid-waste transfer station across town.

Jim Walters with Waste Connections operates a front-end loader to push trash aboard a container van, staged on the lower level of the Sitka Waste Transfer Station. The containers are barged to Seattle. (Photo by Robert Woolsey/KCAW)

There, it and most other Sitka trash is unloaded, shoved into shipping containers and trucked back across town to a barge dock. There, it joins more containers from Sitka and other Southeast towns.

Sitka’s trash has taken that trip since the year 2000, when officials realized they were running out of space.

“The landfill was reaching a level to where it needed a new location. It was becoming a mountain,” said former Sitka City Administrator Hugh Bevan.

He said officials considered building a new dump. But more stringent environmental regulations would have made it extremely expensive.

New landfills have to virtually eliminate polluted runoff. And that’s hard to do in Southeast, where it rains up to 12 feet a year.

“And the idea of shipping waste to an off-island landfill rose to the top as being the most cost-effective over the long term,” Bevan said.

Trash from Southeast Alaska and the Pacific Northwest travel by train from Seattle to the Roosevelt Regional Landfill near the Columbia River. (Photo by Tom Banse/Northwest News Network)

Sitka now barges approximately 8,000 tons of garbage a year south. When added to trash from four other Southeast cities, it totals about 22,000 tons. Another 1,300 tons of regional recycling is shipped the same way.

The approximately 800-mile Alaska Marine Lines barge trip covers long stretches of open water and sometimes rough seas. It takes about 10 days.

After arriving at the barge dock, the containers are loaded onto trucks for a short ride to the Republic Services rail yard, just south of downtown Seattle. Once loaded onto rail cars, they head about 300 miles east to the Roosevelt Regional Landfill in southcentral Washington.

The final destination

That’s where the long journey of southeast Alaska’s trash comes to an end.

The landfill is in a wide bowl a few miles above the Columbia River. It’s bone dry and there’s not a neighbor in sight, which are two key reasons why it’s been so successful in getting contracts with cities near and far.

“It’s under the radar and that’s really the way we like it,” said Don Tibbetts, a Washington state-based manager for Republic Services, which owns the landfill.

“People like the garbage ferries to just take care of the garbage,” he said. “They don’t want to know where it goes. They just want to make sure it is being handled responsibly.”

Republic Services’ Don Tibbets looks over piles of garbage at the Roosevelt Regional Landfill, where he served as general manager. The landfill takes in about 22,000 tons of Southeast Alaska garbage each year. (Photo by Tom Banse/Northwest News Network)

Tibbets said the regional landfill business took off when the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency cracked down on polluted runoff from garbage dumps. He said this landfill is “highly engineered” with liners and collection systems to capture and treat whatever harmful liquid does percolate through.

Southeast Alaska’s garbage is not alone. Much of Western Washington’s trash also heads here on trains often stretching more than a mile long.

“More than likely, about 10 percent of the containers you see on the train in front of you has Alaska waste on it,” Tibbets said.

One last truck ride shuttles the garbage containers a short distance uphill to the landfill, where the trash is finally tipped out, compacted and buried.

The decomposing garbage generates landfill gas, or methane. A network of pipes and wells collects that gas and sends it next door to a small power plant to be burned to make electricity. So in a small way, the banana peels and hamburger wrappers Alaskans throw away indirectly light homes in the small towns of southcentral Washington state.

Three other regional landfills are also located along the Columbia River.

Other options

Before Southeast communities started shipping garbage to the Lower 48, they considered a similar option — not so far away.

A group of cities called the Southeast Alaska Solid Waste Authority looked at a chunk of land in Thorne Bay, a former logging camp on Prince of Wales Island’s eastern shore.

City Administrator Wayne Benner heads up the authority’s board.

“That actually was a serious prospect,” he said. “When they first started out they were looking at a regional landfill facility. But when the study was done to look at it, it did not pencil out.”

So Petersburg, Wrangell and Klawock joined Sitka and Ketchikan by hiring Republic Services to haul its garbage south. Benner said Thorne Bay will be next.

It’s always possible that new technology and attitudes will change how the region’s garbage is handled. But ‘til then, Sitka’s Hugh Bevan thinks barging it south is the best solution.

“The thing to keep in mind with solid waste is that you’re responsible for it forever,” he said. “So if you build a landfill in your town, the responsibility for it flows to the next generation, along with all the capital costs associated with it.”

Not every Southeast community ships out its trash. Juneau, with about half of the region’s population, still uses a local landfill. So does Haines.

In both cases, garbage collection and disposal is done by a private company.

Most of Juneau’s garbage ends up in the local landfill, operated by Waste Management. A municipal study estimates it will fill up in about 20 years. (Photo by Ed Schoenfeld/CoastAlaskaNews)