'It's time:' South Slave leaders consider region's 1st recycling facility

People were talking about the possibility of a new recycling centre for the South Slave region at a public meeting in Enterprise Wednesday night.

It would be the first in the South Slave region.

The facility could allow communities to recycle plastics, metals, and other materials that currently go in the trash.​ They would then be shipped south to be recycled.

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"It's a starting place to talk about a very important issue," said Enterprise Mayor Craig McMaster.

"It's on everybody's mind; it needs to be done."

Many ideas were floated – from building ski hills out of trash, to filling in mine pits with it.

Hay River Mayor Brad Mapes attended the meeting with deputy mayor Donna-Lee Jungkind. The two repeatedly brought up the notion of dumping garbage in the pits at Pine Point — a former mine site between Hay River and Fort Resolution.

Mapes also suggested that the region could charge Arctic communities, such as Cambridge Bay, Nunavut, to import their waste.

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Forget dumps and landfills, says organizer

But those ideas weren't meant to be the focus of the meeting, according to its organizer.

"Not a fan of the talks of dumps or landfills, or further polluting our land," said Marissa Oteiza, office manager for Ecology North in Hay River.

"I feel like whatever we do should be preventing further landfills from being full, and burying your garbage is not a solution."

The tiny community of Kakisa has already started its own recycling program, after growing concerns about plastic trash showing up in trees and the area surrounding its landfill.

It has ordered sorting bins for the community and ships recyclables to Yellowknife.

"We want clean air and clean land," said Melaine Simba, Kakisa's environment co-ordinator.

"We're not thinking about how much it costs for our waste to go to Yellowknife. It doesn't matter, as long as we're recycling, and it's for the environment."

She hopes everyone gets on the same page for the next meeting.

Oteiza says she wants those future meetings to focus on action and address specifics, such as the location of the facility and what could be recycled there.

"My concern with this is that it'll just be meeting after meeting and nothing will actually get done," Oteiza said.

"It's 2017 in a few months. It's time."

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