Of Bears and Trash: The Aftermath of Churchill's Waste Facility Fire

In April, the trash storage facility in Churchill, Manitoba, Canada, burned to the ground, leaving the residents of the Polar Bear Capital of the World with nowhere to store their garbage. That inevitably led to concerns about hungry polar bears being attracted by the smell of food waste – and, sure enough, at the tail end of bear season this year, a number of polar bears invaded the landfill that had been opened to take care of excess trash.  

Here, Geoff York, Polar Bears International's senior director of research and policy, explains what happened and what needs to happen next to protect both bears and residents. 

Let’s begin by turning the clock back 20 or so years. Historically, how did Churchill dispose of its garbage? 

They had open landfills, and they did some low temperature burning of waste to try to reduce the volume, which of course emitted harmful smoke. That created a mix of burned and unburned garbage, and it was all accessible to wildlife broadly, and polar bears specifically. In those days, you could regularly see polar bears pawing through the trash, trying to avoid the flames. Aside from problems to the bears themselves from ingesting garbage, the open landfill taught the bears to associate food waste with people and mothers taught their cubs that behavior — leading to food-conditioned bears that were more difficult to manage and more likely to come into conflict with people.

How did the town move on from that? 

Churchill is – or historically was –  fortunate because of the military presence that was in town for so many years. One consequence was that the military left behind a large warehouse that the town was able to adapt to store two to three years' worth of garbage at a time. It was also large enough to handle and sort recyclables  and hazardous materials, which could then be shipped out for better disposal elsewhere or for monetary gain. In addition to the new storage facility, the town transitioned to a more modern landfill, one known as a cap-and-fill landfill. So, every two to three years, they would get a permit, dig a hole, bury and compact the garbage, cover it back up again, and then begin storing trash again for another couple of years.  

The landfill has a high chain link bolstered with electric fencing, but the real beauty of it was that people weren’t in and out of it constantly, and the trash was buried. And when the bears were onshore, especially late in the fall, the landfill was inactive and fenced.  

But then in April, disaster struck?

Yes. The warehouse burned to the ground and so literally overnight, Churchill lost its waste storage facility, it lost its recycling facility, it lost its hazardous materials facility, and it lost its ability to store waste over a longer period of time. Normally, for a community of 800 or so, we might not even be talking about this, but they have a few thousand tourists each year, which radically changes things. As a result, the community has big pulses of waste that flow into a system that, with the warehouse, was able to handle that kind of sudden flux. This year, without the warehouse,  was a different story; the community desperately tried to find places where they could keep trash indoors, but by the very end of the season, they had essentially run out of space.  So, they opened the landfill, and the bears came. 

Were there any incidents with polar bears this season as a result? 

The big incident was that the bears broke through the fence around the landfill, which they were able to do because of several unfortunate events happening at once.  

Right at the end of the season, Churchill had an unusually warm spell before it got properly cold. And that temperature transition from very warm – seasonally speaking – to properly cool caused an icing event: as the temperature went from warm and humid to cold, all the moisture just came out of the air and attached itself to every surface it could find. Metals, power lines, fences, everything just got coated. That took out the electric fence at the dump, at the same time that the community was actively dumping waste. So, one of the key protections failed catastrophically just as people were dumping trash.  

Bears still weren’t out on the sea ice because it was just starting to freeze. Some tore through the fence. And next thing you know, bears were in the landfill. I think the maximum number reported to us was 30 bears. That obviously created a very stressful and unsafe situation for public works people and for the conservation officers that were tasked with trying to keep the bears out. There was no power, there was no light, and so these poor public works folks were going out there, often by themselves, having to manually open a gate to drive their truck inside, with polar bears in the vicinity. And it became one of those situations where, even when the sea ice came in, the bears had no incentive to leave, because they had plenty of food. 

Polar Bears International purchased a gate opener, a mobile light station, and supplies to improve the electric fencing. We were able to get the light station up and running to improve safety and visibility, though other supplies arrived late. PBI will work with the town as they fix the hard fence, repair and beef up the electric fence and install the gate opener.

So now the town is faced with a dilemma in terms of what to do with its trash, I assume. 

Yes. Losing that storage capacity impacted their waste management program as a whole. Once people could no longer go out to the warehouse and dump their trash and recyclables, it started to accumulate in town, where it was less protected. One small piece of good news is that Polar Bears International had been purchasing bear-proof bins for use in and around town, which suddenly took on extra importance together with some locally made containers. They were redeployed in more visible places. They were heavily used and highly appreciated. In addition, PBI had already assigned a chunk of money toward more and larger bins for use in town, but they didn’t arrive until this year’s bear season was over. But they’ve now been deployed and will be ready for next year. 

Before all this happened, there had been conversations about upgrading the waste facility to a much more advanced system, is that correct? 

The town could see that the model they were using was not sustainable. The cost of that cap-and-fill system was in the range of $200,000 to $250,000 annually. When they had to open the landfill and bury the trash, it doubled, so about every two to three years, they're talking $500,000 for a town of 700 people. And again, a lot of that is down to that influx of thousands of people for a few weeks every year. 

So, Polar Bears International supported the town by funding a three-year project with a consultant from the University of Manitoba. She was chosen by the community and pretty quickly landed on a system known as a pyrolytic thermal oxidizer. It's a high heat system with scrubbers to mitigate, as much as one can, the environmental negatives of burning trash. You can then use the heat from that system to either generate electricity, which Churchill doesn't need because it has hydropower, or generate heat. In Churchill, all of the potable water that circulates around for sinks and showers and whatnot is heated so it doesn't freeze underground; the town currently pays for the electricity to heat up that water, so this would be completely offset and there would be one less bill for the community. It could also be a regional solution, in that other small communities could send their waste to Churchill to be taken care of, depending on the size of the incinerator. And if there was more of a regional or federal strategy to pull in waste from communities and use Churchill as a model for a hub and spoke system that could be replicated across northern Canada to address waste, then that to me would be the ideal end result from all of this.  

So has the fire accelerated these plans? 

The initial bid for a dual compost / pyrolytic solution came in eye-wateringly high. It was somewhere in the neighborhood of $9 million Canadian, way more than Churchill could afford. It was clear that this would necessitate provincial and/or federal funding, so we assisted the town in applying for those funds and later wrote letters to the provincial government outlining the situation and asking for help. We don’t know what the government is thinking. It’s unclear if they are looking at this in a broader sense — whether they’re looking beyond Churchill and saying, “Hey, you know, right now we have this acute issue in Churchill, but if we solve it correctly, it could actually help us with multiple communities.” 

What about the near-term? 

Prior to the icing event mentioned earlier that knocked out power to the landfill, the dump was protected by electric fencing and PBI helped to further enhance security by electrifying the gate – the one weak spot – and adding lighting. Days are short in Churchill at this time of year, so lighting is critical to worker safety.

With the electrified fencing knocked out, the town’s priority is to go back to the landfill and reestablish it so that polar bears aren’t able to get in and PBI is supporting the town in that effort.

PBI also delivered six new large bear-proof bins that have been put around town, giving Churchill a little more storage capacity. And, the town has a new garbage truck that’ll be able to come around and collect trash. As mentioned earlier, Churchill has applied for a grant to construct a building that would house both an incinerator and a composter. But in the near term, there at least needs to be a trash storage facility of some kind, maybe not at the same scale they had, but at least enough to get them to bear season. So that’s in the pipeline. 

All of this shows how complex some of the issues we face can be, right? I’m sure you had no expectation that being a polar bear biologist would require a knowledge of incineration and composting systems, but here we are. 

One of the things I have come to appreciate about working in and with northern communities is that sometimes, to get the things done that we want done – and in our case, we want to protect polar bears - we might have to do non-polar bear things. They may be things that seem tangential to us, but they’ll build the pathway, build the network, the support, the pieces that we need so we can get to this other thing that we’re trying to achieve long-term.  

For me, waste is at the forefront in this regard. We have to keep bears out of garbage. If we don’t, we’re going to just have this pipeline of bears more likely to get in conflict with people, and we’re going to have more injury to people and property and ultimately more bear deaths.  

I mean, if you just look at it from a conservation organization standpoint, you want to say, “Save the polar bear.” Well, we’ll never achieve that if we don’t make sure we have tolerance for their conservation among people who live with polar bears, right? 

Unless you can do things that make people feel safe, you’re really pushing the car uphill. So, yes, it’s all related. It’s very complicated. None of it is cheap, none of it is easy, and none of it happens quickly.