Akeego Ekho, a 40-year-old grandmother, stands by the litter-clogged creek between the public health building and her home. For the past 16 years she’s pulled on her gumboots and waded in to clean up. In return, she says neighbours give her weird looks. When she asks why they don’t help, some even swear at her.
Plastic bags, coffee cups and blocks of styrofoam bob up and down in a river beside the expansion of the Baffin Regional Hospital. Garbage that washes into the bay either returns to shore or becomes swept out of sight by powerful tides, until it’s found in the stomachs of birds and marine animals that mistook the trash for food.
You can find dirty diapers on Iqaluit’s streets, mixed with plastic bottles, cigarette butts and other trash. Would you rather walk the streets of Iqaluit, or tour the landfill? It’s not much of a choice. This Environment Week, the capital of Nunavut looks like one big, sprawling dump.
Pop bottles and aluminum cans, chip bags and candy wrappers, plastic grocery bags and empty cigarette packs are just the tip of the trash heap.
You’ll also see dirty diapers, used condoms, broken glass and car batteries along the trash-strewn streets.
Broken furniture and soggy mattresses pile high in some yards. Rusting cars with broken windows sit on blocks, and disemboweled snowmobiles lie in pieces.
Look in the litter-clogged streams and ditches, and you’ll find car tires, rusting bicycles and half-disintegrated hunks of styrofoam. The banks of one creek glimmer with an oily sheen.
Trash washed into the bay either returns to shore, or is swept out of sight by powerful tides. But when birds and marine mammals find it, they sometimes mistake it for food.
After it rains, countless cigarette butts float in a yawning mud puddle at the entrance to the Frobisher Inn, greeting visitors who must drag their luggage through the muck.
Other storefronts in town aren’t much better. At the Quick Stop off the Ring Road, residents clearly use the garbage cans. And when the lids knock loose, ravens and the wind scatter the trash far and wide.
Garbage is nothing new now, when most of the snow has melted. And it’s not as bad today as a few weeks ago, perhaps in part because of prisoners from the Baffin Correctional Centre who pick up trash on day parole.
Government workers will chip away at the filth next Friday, June 16, during the annual community clean-up. Students help by hitting the schoolyards and beach.
City garbage collectors will remove furniture and mattresses the following week, and hazardous waste the week to follow.
Until then, long-time residents say they’re disgusted by how bad the mess has gotten.
“Every year it gets worse,” says Akeego Ekho, a 40-year-old grandmother. For the past 16 years she’s pulled on her gumboots and waded into the creek near the public health building, across the street from her house, to pull out trash.
In return, she says neighbours give her weird looks. Some even swear at her when she asks why they don’t help.
“One kid said I was picking garbage for money. That was kind of hurtful,” she says.
Last Monday she filled up five grocery bags full of cigarette butts from her neighbourhood. On Tuesday she pulled five bags of litter from the creek.
But she knows the garbage will be back. Two weeks ago she cleaned up the nearby playground. One week later, candy wrappers and chip bags and pop bottles litter the area again.
Worse, last year she pulled eight bags of garbage from the creek, left them tied up by the roadside and asked city workers to pick them up.
Two weeks later, the bags sat untouched, until kids ripped them open and dumped the trash back in the water.
Most of the muck clearly belongs to residents, but others say construction companies share part of the blame.
“Absolutely disgraceful,” Bryan Pearson says as he looks out his window towards Toonik Lake, where broomball matches were held during the first Toonik Tyme festival in 1965.
Snowcapped hills in the distance look striking as they reflect off the lake, but heaps of trash and construction junk are an eyesore, and a danger to kids playing in the area, Pearson warns.
Today the lake edge is used as a “lay-over” site by SNC-Lavalin for the expansion of Aqsarniit Middle School, and as a snow dump by the city.
Last Thursday, nails jutted from plywood boards and wooden planks. Metal beams, wire fencing and sheets of plastic all tangled together at the lakefront. Closer to the water’s edge lay aerosol cans of deodorant, styrofoam coffee mugs, cardboard, pop cans and chip bags.
By this Monday, workers had made a noticeable dent in the debris and litter, although trash continued to float in the water nearby.
Robert Luison, Lavalin’s project manager at the school, says his company received several complaints from the Government of Nunavut about garbage at the lake. In response, they plan to haul six dumpsters worth of trash from the site soon.
Over at the expansion of Baffin Regional Hospital, more trash spills from another of Lavalin’s construction sites into a nearby stream, where plastic bags, coffee cups and blocks of styrofoam bob in the water.
Milk cartons and juice tetrapacks, pop cans and cigarette packs, empty bags of pretzels and Jam Jams, all lie in snow by the stream, beside work gloves and insulation.
Peter Michels, project manager at the hospital, says two dumpsters of garbage are removed from the site every day. “When the snow’s gone, the crap will be gone too,” he says.
Admittedly, the garbage only makes the work sites blend in with the rest of the city.
Under the city’s solid waste bylaw, residents and companies can be fined for littering and storing garbage in an untidy manner. Residents could face fines up to $2,000, while companies could face fines up to $10,000. If the ticket isn’t paid, offenders could face six months in prison.
Over the last three weeks, bylaw officers issued about 20 warnings for litter and messiness, said bylaw chief Robert Kavanaugh. If offenders don’t clean up their property in three weeks, they face a fine.
SNC-Lavalin received warnings last year and this year for their work sites, Kavanaugh said. However, he added other properties are worse. Bylaw officers plan to issue warnings to more offenders in weeks to come.
Of course, that wouldn’t be needed if more Iqalummiut only followed Ehko’s example.
“I tell everybody, use the garbage. Just use your pockets,” she says. “They say, ‘oh, I’m too lazy.’ Or, ‘oh, I don’t do that.’”