Talking Trash: Experts Share Challenges, Best Practices for Waste Management in Arctic Cities

Solid waste management is an unglamorous but fundamental challenge faced by all cities around the world. Removing waste from homes, businesses, and other locations is a massive logistical and operational task. When done poorly, it can have severe consequences for human health and environmental quality.

Arctic cities face uniquely challenging conditions for solid waste management, including harsh weather, geographic remoteness, and limited infrastructure and funding for operations and maintenance. It’s perhaps not surprising, then, that Arctic residents produce twice as much garbage annually than the global per capita average, with lower rates of waste collection and recycling than the rest of the world. Unlined landfills and open garbage burning are still used in some parts of the region.

With climate change poised to complicate waste management in the Arctic, the Belfer Center’s Arctic Initiative and the Arctic Mayors’ Forum brought together a pan-Arctic panel of practitioners and researchers to explore innovative approaches to address pollution and create cleaner, more sustainable places to live. 

Read on for key takeaways from the webinar panelists, Ernst Kloosterman, head of Tromsø’s Unit for Climate, Environment, and Agriculture; Mark Spafford, Alaska Waste Group leader at Jacobs Engineering Group; Nivi Strunz, managing director at Kommune Qeqertalik, Greenland; and Jukka Teräs, senior researcher at NORCE. The seminar was moderated by Arctic Initiative Postdoctoral Research Fellow Nadezhda Filimonova. 

Isolation, snow, policy disconnects make a hard job harder

Arctic cities tend to have small populations, with correspondingly small labor pools and municipal budgets. That presents extra challenges for hiring, training, and equipping workers for a dangerous occupation, said Mark Spafford, the former general manager of solid waste services in Anchorage, Alaska. “Solid waste is one of the most dangerous industries in the world as far as fatalities and injuries go,” said Spafford. Staffing a waste management department “goes beyond having enough staff,” he added. “It's making sure that staff are doing things in a safe manner, that they've got the tools they need to do their job safely, and…every day they can go home to their dog or their family.”

The core issue for many Arctic cities, said Jukka Teräs, is a “simple lack of critical mass of people and waste compared to bigger cities.” Small populations mean “waste is collected in insufficient volumes to make its processing cost-effective,” wrote moderator Nadezhda Filimonova. Geographical remoteness from other cities makes it both expensive to build local waste facilities, and also expensive to transport waste to other locations for processing. 

“Every community is an island,” said Spafford. “80 to 85 percent of the stuff that we collect [in Anchorage] for recycling has to get hauled on a barge back to Seattle to actually get sourced and separated.” Lacking a local waste facility and faced with high transportation costs, many Alaskans don’t recycle. “At my house here in Alaska, just to give you perspective, it's half as much to throw stuff away in a garbage can than it is to have a recycling container. So really, from a fundamental cost perspective, there's no reason that people here in Alaska, or in Anchorage, specifically, need to recycle anything, because it just costs more.”

In Qeqertalik, Greenland - population 6,340 - remoteness and low density create a tricky logistical puzzle: “In the small settlements, they don't produce as much waste as they do in the urbanized areas. It's very difficult to plan and to estimate how much solid waste there will be when I send the ships out to get it,” said Nivi Strunz. Some settlements are so remote that they cannot be reached by ship, and trash must be transported on snowmobiles.

Waste management methods that are standard in other parts of the world aren’t always the best option in the Arctic due to the region’s extreme cold. Tromsø receives 4 to 8 meters (13 to 26 feet) of snow every winter, making collection of bins by truck difficult, though not impossible, said Ernst Kloosterman. In Qeqertalik, permafrost makes composting impossible, added Strunz. As the Arctic warms three to four times faster than the rest of the world, rapid environmental transformation, such as thawing permafrost, threatens to compromise landfills and wastewater systems in many communities.

Many different factors influence the waste management approaches taken by the cities represented in the webinar (Tromsø, Qeqertalik, and Anchorage), including their level of development, available resources, and country-level regulations. In highly developed Tromsø, national and EU regulations were widely accepted, reported Kloosterman, and the city’s own sustainable development plans have helped encourage uptake of recycling, incineration, and energy-from-waste facilities. In contrast, Strunz spoke about the challenges of legitimizing decisions made by the Danish government and the European Union in Greenland’s post-colonial setting: “There’s a lot of feelings whenever we talk about living up to the standards of Denmark,” she said, partly due to the difference in funding and capacity compared to Denmark. Spafford expressed frustration at what he perceived as a lack of political will at the state level in Alaska, where landfills are the dominant waste disposal method, to regulate solid waste management and divert waste from landfills: “Some people think there's a lot of space here, and you can just dump garbage, and take it out wherever. There hasn't really been a big effort from a regulatory perspective.”

Arctic cities are experimenting with new technology and traditional culture

Faced with a growing waste problem and increasingly challenging conditions for management, Arctic cities are testing out a wide range of innovative approaches to dealing with solid waste. 

Panelists cited examples of “clustering initiatives” and public-private partnerships, including a planned biogas plant that will serve the greater Tromsø area and a partnership between the city of Tromsø and Remiks company to research robotics-assisted optical sorting solutions. Four of Greenland’s five municipalities have joined forces to establish two incinerators that meet European Union standards for carbon emissions, said Strunz. The first incinerator entered service in January 2024. 

More and more cities are emphasizing circular economy principles, said Kloosterman, and “treating the waste as a resource.” In Tromsø, biogas from organic or food waste powers a small fleet of trash collection trucks, and the incineration of waste is used for district heating. The process is still carbon-polluting, Kloosterman admitted, but the “advantage with this is that we skip…a lot of truckloads of waste which were transported to Sweden before, which avoids a lot of traffic and also CO₂ emissions from transport.”

In comparatively resource-strapped Qeqertalik, Strunz is piloting educational campaigns that draw on Inuit culture to increase the cultural and social legitimacy of waste sorting and recycling. “What I'm trying to do is make it a norm to go back to basics, to find the roots of this in a culturally accepted way and say, ‘We have to do this, because the mother of the sea, she stops sending us food when we tangle her hair,’ things like that,” said Strunz. “I need something that's accessible information for citizens, something that is not my environmental engineer jargon, but translated for citizens.”