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Hazardous waste shipped out of Ulukhaktok
Officials 'have to be held responsible' for dumping waste

Katie May
Northern News Services
Published Wednesday, September 29, 2010

ULUKHAKOTOK/HOLMAN - He doesn't know how they got there, but for years Fred Akoaksion has looked in disdain upon dozens of barrels of oil and anti-freeze dumped at Ulukhaktok's landfill; he feared they would at any moment leak out and leave the community with a mess too costly to clean up.

NNSL photo/graphic

Containers of oil and antifreeze that had languished at the Ulukhaktok landfill were shipped out of the community during the summer. - photo courtesy of Mike Lawson

Today, his disdain has turned to pride as the 37-year-old hamlet employee reflected on a summer of work shipping out thousands of litres of fuel and hazardous chemicals, piles of old tires and of lead acid batteries that had built up at the dump over more than a decade.

"It's a big difference up at our landfill there," Akoaksion said. "It makes me feel better inside to go to the dump and see that there's no waste oil or drums up there that somebody might knock over or some kid might puncture a barrel so that we'd see a large oil spill. But we won't see that now."

Akoaksion was one of a handful of community members working with Mike Lawson, the hamlet mechanic and Public Works foreman, to clear away most of the waste this past summer. Most of the oil and chemicals were shipped south to facilities in British Columbia, while the batteries were taken by barge to a storage facility in Hay River.

Lawson started working in Ulukhaktok at the beginning of July, and said he knew right away that he had to do something about the hazardous waste.

"When you first come into town from the airport, one of the things you pass is the landfill," he said. "You see all this natural beauty in the cliffs and the surroundings, and then you see this big sore."

Lawson got on the phone with the shipping company Northern Transportation Company Limited (NTCL), who allowed the use of empty shipping containers to transport the waste, and he got officials from the Department of Environment and Natural Resources to help with paperwork while the environmental safety company Hazco provided the documentation necessary to move the waste out of the territory, across the Alaska Border and down to British Columbia.

In total, Lawson, Akoaksion and the group of Ulukhaktok residents – including youth working off their community service hours – packed up and shipped about 12,000 litres of oil mixed with antifreeze, two 20-foot containers of old tires and crates upon crates of acid batteries. Still left at the landfill, aside from household trash, are disused vehicles, gas cans and dozens of old furnace tanks. Most of it ended up in the dump following industrial or government-contracted projects in the community and has accumulated over the past decade.

Lawson, who comes from a logging family on the coast of British Columbia, isn't trying to paint himself as an environmentalist. But he said people must properly dispose of waste, even though the shipping costs from Northern communities can be prohibitively high.

"We're just going to poison ourselves," he said. "There's ways we can deal with it – it's the cost of doing business. It's the cost to us as a society to have the convenience of things like pickups and snowmobiles and airplanes and everything else."

Exploration companies and government agencies that have left waste in the community are to blame, he said.

"The cleanup should be part of your costs of doing business, and those people have to be held responsible," Lawson said. "The federal government can't just walk away and say, 'OK, now it's yours.' Take your responsibility with you."

With four donated shipping containers from NTCL to use next summer, community residents plan to ship out their waste backhaul regularly.

"Instead of going to the landfill, now we can deal with it as we create it," Lawson said. "We still have lots to do, but we've started."

Similar cleanup efforts are going on in other Northern communities that have built up decades of waste. A few weeks ago in Iqaluit, for example, government officials cleared out more than two tonnes of scrap metal to be sent to a dealer in Quebec.

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