Trash fire leaves Pang smelling like a dump

SARA MINOGUE

As landfill approaches capacity, burning is the only answer

One of Nunavut’s most photographed landscapes was smudged with an ugly reality last week when smoke from the burning garbage dump obscured the view of the Pangnirtung Fiord.

”The whole community smells like a dump,” said Billy Etooangat, who was disgusted when he woke up to a burning mess on Thursday morning and headed to the office of Auyuittuq National Park, where he works as a communications officer.

The unwholesome blaze was ugly, smelly and dirty, but it’s also the only solution to a rapidly filling dump — at least until the hamlet is able to find an alternative, and affordable, solution to its waste problems. The fire was originally started by hamlet workers, who burn small piles of garbage in the dump about every two months.

Normally, they wait until the winds are likely to take the smoke away from the community. This time, the wind picked up in the wrong direction, spreading the fire to a larger pile of trash, and sending smoke all over town.

The fire department was soon at the scene, but decided to let the trash burn down a bit before tackling the fire. The dump burned for about two days.

For Etooangat, Friday was even worse than Thursday. The winds were calm, leaving the smoke, haze and stink to linger in the air.

Fortunately, there were no tourists in town but Etooangat was concerned that some visiting workers would have been less-than-impressed with the site of a burning landfill just several hundred meters away from the Government of Nunavut’s main office.

That’s not to mention people who live in the upper town of Pangnirtung, who got an even worse dose of the smoke, fog and the smell than those in the lower town. Or any of several joggers who run along the road to the dump – Pang’s longest stretch of road.

“I don’t think they’ll be jogging today,” Etooangat said.

But Etooangat was practical about the fire.

“We all know the dump is too close to the community because the community’s expanding and it’s in a very bad location. We have to burn the garbage because if we don’t, it all gets carried because of very strong winds,” he said.

The dump ruins the view of the fiord, and is sometimes the first thing people see in the community when their plane lands on the runway in the middle of town, but at the moment there’s no alternative.

“We have to burn our garbage every so often just to beat up the piles of it,” said Greg Morash, the hamlet’s senior administrative officer.

He gives the dump about six months to live, guessing that it’s already 85 to 90 per cent full.

Pang is now in the “very preliminary stages” of planning a new dump, Morash said, adding that could take a couple of years.

Part of the problem is Pang’s new sewage treatment plant – now fully up and running since it was installed three years ago.

Instead of pumping raw sewage into the ocean, the treatment plant pumps fairly clean water into the sea and sends treated solid waste into the dump.

The GN’s Department of Community and Government Services has set aside $500,000 for a study to figure out the best way to get rid of that waste.

Building a new landfill might be inevitable, but where would it go? The hamlet is wedged on a small shelf between the sea and mountains, leaving little room for another dump.

One solution, Morash says, is composting. He’d like to see wood, paper and animal products run through a shredder, and mixed with waste from the sewage plant to produce harmless dirt. The procedure is similar to what the city of Iqaluit is planning to do with its sewage treatment plant.

Morash guesses that would use up 30 to 35 per cent of the waste going into the dump, and produce soil that could be used in the community. The hamlet council has approved the idea, and GN staffers have verbally confirmed its possibility.

“Use your imagination,” Morash says. “We could have lawns in Pang. We could have a golf course.”

But Doug Sitland, the director of community infrastructure and lands, points out that the compost produced by this process may not produce the rich, black soil Morash might be thinking of.

In fact, making usable compost soil is a tough process. First, it must be tested before it gets used, and that testing usually sends the compost back for more treatment before it can be safely spread around the community.

And there is another problem in Pang. The fish plant also produces waste that adds to the load at the dump.

When fish guts are factored into the compost equation, Sitland says it is unlikely that Pang will be able to produce usable compost by letting nature take its course.

The study now underway is looking for a solution to all three waste problems. Sitland suspects the hamlet may wind up with a compactor instead of a shredder. That machine could press the solid waste from the sewage treatment plant – and possibly the fish plant – into blocks that could be used to cover the dump.

That’s not quite the same as compost, but it would produce a product that is environmentally harmless, and covering the dump would put an end to wind-scattered garbage littering the community.

The solution will be important, because many other communities, especially in the Baffin, share the same problem that Pang does: growing waste and little room to expand.

The study could be finished as soon as July, but any of these solutions are still a couple of years away. Ideally, a model system will be in place before any other communities start looking at sewage treatment plants – and start producing more waste than they currently have to manage.

In the meantime, the short-term solution is for hamlet workers to try burning the trash more often, in smaller piles.
“We do have complaints from people when we burn the garbage,” Morash says, “but people have to understand that if we don’t burn, what are we gonna do? We’re stuck.”