As online shopping increased, the cardboard is piling up

If you stand in line at the Nome Post Office you see box after box passed across the counter to one happy Nomeite after another. The boxes, most with a graphic smile printed on the side, bring goods from the outside world. Once they are empty, those boxes are a problem. They are stuffed into trash cans and dumpsters, taking up space and making life difficult for the collectors. “That definitely affects us,” said Buddy Okleasik, lead truck driver for Alaska Waste.

Nome has a small recycling center located in several shipping containers on Warren Place, at the Public Works yard. “Ideally if we had a recycling center we’d have a bailer and could bail cardboard,” said Anahma Shannon, Kawerak’s Environmental Program Director. “It would be in 900-pound bales and we’d be able to sell it.”

But there is no bailer and the loose cardboard placed into the container has to be manually sorted. As cardboard is not hazardous it is not being shipped out as are electronics, old computers, and batteries. “At this time it [cardboard] is not being recycled at all,” said Shannon. The cardboard and the paper goes to the city landfill where it is burned, often used to get the fire hot so the less combustible trash will burn.

In November Shannon hired a contractor to do a feasibility study on a regional recycling center. The hospital and the city helped in selecting Zender Environmental, of Anchorage.

“They will be setting up some community meetings to get feedback from the people in Nome as well as from some of the villages on whether the people even want a recycling center,” said Shannon. With no facility for recycling the options are limited. “We work outside in the cold and rain, in the snow and wind. We have no electricity, no heat and no inside. And we don’t have a bailer, which is essential for any economy of scale.”

One problem the community faces is that Kawerak exists to serve the tribes of the region, not the municipality. The City of Nome is responsible for waste management, not Kawerak. “We help out but it’s not our jurisdiction,” said Shannon. “So we haven’t been able to call the shots.” The City of Nome will have to have some buy-in and participation, according to Shannon.

“We’ve been talking with Kawerak about some recycling in gen

eral,” said Steckman. “But the price of commodities has dropped significantly and the shipping cost from Nome down to someplace that could handle recycling is still high.”

“Several years ago we looked into a cardboard shredder that would allow us to make bricks out of the cardboard,” said Shannon. “But there isn’t anything that’s small enough. There’s one at Chena Hot Springs and it takes a warehouse to run it. The bricks are awesome. You put them in your woodstove and they burn for hours and hours. But we couldn’t find any machine that would fit our size. So it’s not a reality at this time. I think the only thing we’re going to be able to do with the cardboard is to ship it out for recycling. I’m sure it’s a problem in the dumpsters.”

“Obviously the amount of online shopping has increased significantly,” said Steckman. “But I believe there will be a rebalancing of that as soon as a significant number of people are vaccinated with the COVID-19 vaccination.”

Meanwhile the boxes with the smiles keep coming.