Health and Environmental Risks

Top Ten Ways to Reduce your Solid Waste Disposal Risks
Solid waste health and environmental risks
How to make your dump safer
"Left Out In The Cold” Solid Waste Management and the Risks to Resident Health in Native Village Alaska

Top Ten Ways To Reduce Your Solid Waste Disposal Risks

1. Education
Changes people’s risky behavior like scavenging, burning plastics, dumping batteries, drinking untreated water downstream of dump (without testing), and dumping honeybucket wastes at dump, or solid wastes at honeybucket site.

2. Waste (And Honeybucket) Collection Program
Keeps people out of dump, prevents random fire setting and battery disposal, helps with waste consolidation, waste area separation, stops honeybuckets from being dumped at dumpsite, and garbage being dumped at honeybucket site.

3. Better Site Access
Reduces tundra degradation, promotes waste consolidation and waste area separation, reduces people/waste contact.

4. Separate Waste Area
Stops scavenging, promotes waste reuse (and volume reduction), stores wastes for future recycling.

5. Burnbox or Incinerator
Reduces disease organisms, reduces volume, reduces disease vectors, detracts bears, stops uncontrolled fires. Burn wastes only in well-designed and maintained burnbox, and downwind of village.

6. Frequent Cover
Covering your dumpsite/landfill reduces disease organism contact, reduces volume, reduces disease vectors, detracts bears. Alternative cover materials include tarp(s), wood chips, rock, shredded or weighted plastic, crushed glass, old clothing, textiles, rugs, etc.

7. Stop Smoke Inhalation
Reduces respiratory symptoms and reduces potential for rashes, cancer and respiratory diseases. Switch to good, maintained burnbox, burn wastes only downwind of homes, prevent people from entering dump during burn days or when smoky, ban home barrel burning of non-paper/food wastes.

8. Battery Recycling
Greatly reduces toxicity of leachate, stops risk of acid burns to children visiting dump. Click here for information about recycling batteries.

9. Know Your Risks
Safeguards community health, prevents subsistence activities from being altered unless necessary. Test suspected water that is used without treatment (e.g. drinking from traditional source, swimming, wading). Test during or just after big rains and flooding for maximum contamination, and test at other times for minimum contamination. Until you are certain it is safe, you may need to stop village use of this water during or just after big rains and flooding. Test for heavy metals and E. coli or Fecal coliform. Click here for information about testing your water.

10. Ban Or Separate Plastics
Reduces smoke toxicity and reduces windblown wastes, litter. The Louden Tribal Council passed a resolution prohibiting their three local stores from using plastic shopping bags (those pesky white bags end up everywhere!). To read more about how they developed their ban, click on this link:
http://www.epa.gov/epaoswer/non-hw/tribal/thirds/galena.htm
Contact Cindy Pilot at the Louden Tribal Council Environmental Department, at 907 656-1711 for more info.

To read about more ways to reduce risks from solid waste disposal click here on the drum.

Solid waste health and environmental risks

Click on the otter below to read Chapter 3 from our "Guide to Closing Solid Waste Disposal Sites in Alaska Villages" which contains detailed information about health and environmental risks from open dumps:

How to make your dump safer

To read about many ways to make your dump safer, click on the dove below:

“Left Out In The Cold”

Results from our database (i.e. our solid waste survey) were compiled into a document called “Left Out in the Cold: Solid Waste Management and the Risks to Resident Health in Native Village Alaska.” The document contains solid waste statistics and also includes results from a Village health study that was carried out as part of our 2001 solid waste project.

To read this document, click on the box below: