Nome gets a thorough spring cleanup
A sunny Saturday afternoon filled kids with hot dogs for filling up trash bags as part of the City of Nome’s Spring Cleanup effort. Five lucky winners got certificates for bicycles at AC, and many more got to take home sweatshirts, sunglasses and berry buckets. Not far away, Kawerak was collecting e-waste to be broken down, sorted and shipped off to Seattle for recycling.
Families sat out waiting for the raffle drawing, enjoying their hot dogs and soda, after a week of collecting trash. Every bag collected earned a ticket, and every 12 tickets was a chance to win a bike. Students from NACTEC had been collecting trash together, hauling 27 bags off West Beach alone, and said that there was still more to be done.
The five winners were: Skyler Johnson, Cameron Crowe, NACTEC as a group, Lavone Giang and her daughter, and ACSA students. The city manager’s executive assistant Cheryl Thompson, who coordinated and held the raffle, encouraged everyone who won a new bike to have it registered with the Nome Police Department.
This year, Nome Public Works collected 29 trucks worth of trash, had 85 independent visits to the mono-fill and bountied eight old vehicles.
Although there weren’t any hot dogs given out, Kawerak was also collecting trash from across the region, but focusing on e-waste. Computers, TVs, printers, and the like are easily recycled in certain facilities, but can be extremely harmful if disposed of improperly.
“We want everything recycled, nothing in the landfill,” Environmental Assistant Katie Olson said. She explained that they organize the electronics that come in, palletize them, and send them down to the port. They send one Conex per barge via Alaska Marine Lines, which provides four free 20-foot container shipments, which equates to about 50,000 pounds of e-waste not getting buried in Nome’s landfill. Similarly, Bering Air provides backhaul of ewaste and lead-acid batteries from the villages to Nome.
“Once the materials get to Seattle, they are trucked to responsible recyclers that are working with the Backhaul Alaska Program,” explained Anahma Shannon, Environmental Program Director at Kawerak. “The Backhaul Alaska
Program aims to assist every remote community in Alaska in removing hazardous materials from their communities by backhauling it to the Lower 48 where it can be properly processed.”
Shannon, Olson and crew collect e-waste year-round, not only during the City’s Spring Cleanup. This year, they said, they collected around 3,000 pounds of e-waste over the weekend, which is less than last year but Shannon had an idea why.
“I would honestly say that this year’s fantastic weather had more people heading for the hills than last year when it was snowing!” she said.