Solid Waste Solutions in Rural Alaska::
Additional Success Stories from Rural Alaska:

Nelson Island Consortium

Contact:
   Johnathon Lewis
   Chefornak
   907/867-8306

This group has made ground breaking work in community cooperation. These seven communities (one being a summer subsistence camp) formed from a meeting held almost three years ago that was attended by 50 people from all the villages, including a number of elders. Their cooperation is traditional-based, as they have shared the same subsistence areas for thousands of years. They saw these areas being impacted by pollution and felt together, working traditionally and led by their Elders insights, they could reclaim their lands and clean up their communities. They have brought three separate trainings into their villages (HAZWOPER, Freon Certification, and Solid Waste Management Planning), rather than pay separately to go out to Anchorage. The money saved has been devoted to ordering bilingual signs for their subsistence areas asking visitors to bring their trash home, to additional community members traveling to the meetings, to cleanup projects, to monitoring fish nets, to bring Elders to conferences, to recycling efforts, and to teleconferencing. Besides the use of traditional respect in keeping costs low, one of the unique features of the Consortium is that they meet every week by teleconference. The meetings are attended not just by environmental or Nelson Island staff, but also by Tribal Council and Elders.

The Nelson Island Consortium is a sustainable entity that has built enough history and redundancy in the organization such that if one or more villages is dealing with a crisis, or staff turnover occurs or subsistence trips are needed, there are always staff from other villages that will step in to help out. For example, in calling a contact, in hosting a training, in turning in a grant, in researching needed information. Each village has HAZWOPER trained staff and they are ready to assist each other in emergencies. They have developed a planning style with an entrenched foundation in tradition. When two of the villages could not fill a part-time position, rather than keep the money for their own village, they both donated the money to a Consortium-wide subsistence area litter monitoring project. They cooperate in submitting grants, deciding which are important, and each submitting a support letter for the village that is submitting it. In this way, they were able to be funded for three different solid waste related projects.

Over the past two years, each village has begun recycling programs and cleanup projects: one is taking part in a demonstration of tundra bag technology, one is taking part in a demonstration for compost toilets, one is demonstrating how a hazardous waste program can be carried out in the YK Delta. Two villages were able to make significant improvements in the honeybucket disposal situation. The Consortium also received a Brownfield grant they will start next year, which again will be shared equally to fund part-time positions in community education on reducing contaminants, and will fund an in-village GIS training taught in Yup'ik. When one of the staff learns about how to carry out a solid waste component, such as packing and backhauling batteries, they share the information and steps with the other villages. They have shared duties of resolution-making for banning Styrofoam and plastic bags as well as researching contaminant effects on human health, and how to educate their communities in Yup'ik with the information that they gather in English.

Their rotating community meetings are open to all residents and they provide an opportunity for the host community to learn from and meet experts on solid waste and related environmental matters, to voice specific individual concerns, to listen to Elders from other villages, and to understand the Consortium process and participate actively in its projects. There are no other community entities in the state which represent their full communities and who meet on such a regular basis. Most inter-tribal/inter-community organizations are seated in hub villages, and in this past year, the Consortium has demonstrated that an organization alternative for small off-road villages that fits traditional, non-hierarchical community partnering patterns can be as effective as the common urban-centralized inter-village entity model. This demonstration can have a profound effect on increasing community partnerships and sub-regional solutions because it empowers and builds capacity in the village.