yukon river garbage removal program
Villages along the Yukon River are benefiting from greater efforts to clear the area of debris, notably the removal of junk like old cars, lead-acid batteries and broken electrical appliances. It used to be that many of the villages were thought too remote for easy waste-removal. For years, the Yutana Barge Line - purchased by Crowley in 2005 - volunteered its services for backhauling out broken vehicles. But even these efforts were not as far-reaching as they needed to be, reported Captain Endil Moore, Crowley traffic manager in Nenana. Not only were garbage piles unsightly, but many residents feared that the leaking of toxins was polluting groundwater and harming local fish species.
Luckily, a new $600,000 riverside recycling program, led by the Yukon River Intertribal Watershed Council, is changing all that. The Council has united Alaskan and British Columbian tribes in a common cause, pooling grants from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency as part of the long-term goal of making the Yukon waters drinkable again someday. Villagers are responsible for cleaning, processing and crushing old vehicles and appliances, while a number of trucking, railway and shipping services, including Crowley, have teamed up to jointly carry out the actual trash removal.
One and a half million pounds of trash were taken out of the Yukon watershed area last year, and organizers worked to get rid of another two million pounds this summer. Based on the success of these past efforts, Crowley has decided to maintain its level of commitment to cleaning up the Yukon River area. Whenever the company is alerted that a sufficient stockpile of rubbish has been collected at a particular village, a Crowley barge stops by on the way back from delivering paying freight and hauls away the trash. Crowley can proudly claim to be a part of the Yukon’s path to restoration.
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