New compactor to crush city’s garbage problem

MIRIAM HILL

The burning of trash, which has gone on at the city’s landfill site “forever” will soon come to an end, Iqaluit Mayor John Matthews said last week.

Officials held a press conference at the dump on Nov. 7 to show off their new compactor — a piece of heavy equipment that looks like a tractor with big metal spikes on its wheels. It was to be put into action starting Nov. 10.

Along with a plastic and metal recycling program launched last year, the compactor is council’s answer to residents’ concerns about smoke from the landfill, which wafts into the city and not only smells bad, but causes respiratory problems as well.

The group Citizens for a Clean Iqaluit has been pressuring the city’s administration to follow regulations set out in its municipal water licence, which required Iqaluit to stop burning plastics by June 1, 2001. The water licence, issued by the Nunavut Water Board, also stated that only food waste, paper, cardboard and untreated wood could be burned.

However, the city was facing a major labour dispute when the June 1 deadline passed and it didn’t have the capacity or time to deal with water board regulations.

That summer, resident Paul Crowley even took the city to court to get an injunction against the open-air burning, but the judge ruled Crowley failed to offer concrete proof the burning was causing irreparable harm to residents’ health.

Stu Kennedy, chair of the city’s solid-waste management committee, said city council has looked into a variety of options in the past two years, including purchasing an incinerator, but it decided the cost was prohibitive and there were too many risks involved.

About $500,000 later, the city has a compactor and all the equipment needed to crush garbage so it takes up less space, and bury it at the site, extending the life of the landfill six to seven years.

The loader cost about $150,000 and the compactor cost $250,000, financed over three years to amount to $300,000, Matthew Hough, the city’s director of engineering, explained. A large structure to house the equipment, an office, and a place for recyclables to be separated at the dump cost an additional $100,000.

“[The compactor] will run every day for three to four hours,” landfill foreman Darcy Reist said. “It’ll compact garbage into the ground as soon as it comes in.” The loader will move dirt over the garbage immediately to keep gulls and ravens away.

The compactor arrived on this year’s sealift, but blew a fuel-injection nozzle when it came off the boat. It was repaired, Hough said, and other upgrades that would have been required in a year were done at that time, delaying the start of compacting.

Burning ended in late October so that the structure to house the equipment could be built. However, while Reist prepared to give a demonstration of the compactor’s abilities, a small fire smouldered in a pile of garbage.

“We do have to get rid of some of the waste that has been built up,” Hough said. “The objective, though, is to burn as little as possible from now on.”

The compactor, he said, is part of the short-term phase for the city, which will help make the trash fit into a smaller space. The next phase will entail re-evaluating the landfill site to make sure it can operate for a further six to seven years.

As part of a long-term phase, a southern consulting firm came to Iqaluit and ripped open garbage bags to do a waste audit and project how trash will be produced here for the next 20 years. Hough said the report will be made public within a few weeks and will give the city a more accurate idea of what its waste management plan should prepare for.