Ian Elliot
Northern News Services

INUVIK (May 15/98) - Spring is the time when the snow turns to garbage.

Inuvik's streets bear evidence of a year of littering and the amount of garbage scattered around town is seen as one of the main problems with the community nearly every time people gather to talk about the state of the town.

At a recent town council meeting, even the dump was identified as a mess because of the amount of loose litter blowing around the site and onto neighboring properties.

The annual volunteer spring cleanup will take place over the next few weeks and for the first time, the town is going to hire someone to pick up trash in the summer, but the amount of garbage around town is a perennial, if ugly, issue.

"That problem came up in every workshop we had," said Russ Workum, who ran a recent series of focus groups on Inuvik's future.

"If it was the tourism workshop, people felt tourists came in and made comments on it. In the economic development workshop, it was the initial appearances to anyone who wants to come in here and make any kind of investment in the town."

The litter issue comes back with a vengeance in the spring, when the snow melts and every piece of trash thrown away in the past eight months comes to the surface again.

"This time of year it all comes out," he said.

"And it's not just here -- you drive down the ice road and there's bottles and all kinds of trash, and it isn't kids driving the ice road."

Workum said it comes down to an issue of community pride.

"The litter issue always came back to community pride. The people who are proud of their places and own their own places aren't the ones littering."

Even the town dump has been identified as a mess because many of the garbage bags are torn open by garbagemen who remove the refundable bottles from them before pitching the bags. When the garbage truck is dumped, the loose paper and other small items blow all across the landscape. Councillors suggested the practice of garbage collectors ripping open bags to retrieve returnable bottles was a big part of the problem and will ban the practice the next time the garbage contract is put out for bids.

One man wants to get a recycling program started in the town and reduce the amount of waste that goes to the dump in the first place. Isaac Imasuen has applied for funding to start a recycling program in town similar to those in the south, where residents would sort out cans from the rest of their trash and put them out separately for pickup.

"I was concerned about pop cans because the community drinks a lot of pop and you see the cans everywhere," said Imasuen.

"I thought it would start with the cans and maybe move on to other things in the long term."

A quick fix Imasuen can think of for reducing the amount of trash would be to replace broken or missing lids on dumpsters, especially in the downtown area.

"Many of those lids are broken, so ravens go in and pull out a lot of stuff."

Like others, he isn't sure why people in Inuvik drop so much litter on the streets but says the aim of the program is to get people thinking about what they throw away.

"Sometimes people, all people, get a little lazy and throw something down because the may see trash as someone else's responsibility," he said.