Residents of Iqaluit, the capital city of Nunavut, have been without clean drinking water since last week. Photo by Timothy Neesam / Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
“Unlike most southern Canadians, we have faced chronic, large, and growing municipal infrastructure gaps for decades,” wrote Natan Obed, president of the Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami (ITK), an organization representing Inuit in Canada, in a forward to the report. “We currently have little to no direct decision-making involvement in the recycling, reduction, or diversion of the paper, cardboard, plastics, hazardous materials, and e-waste filling our landfills, threatening our freshwater supplies and locally harve
Source: Iqaluit’s water crisis unveils a bigger problem: There’s no recycling in the Arctic | Canada’s National Observer: News & Analysis
Berkeley County Water and Sanitation workers continued to cover mounds of waste with dirt on Thursday, January 10, 2019, to control any odor coming from the Berkeley County landfill on Highway 52. Brad Nettles/Staff. Brad Nettles bnettles@postandcourier.com
It turns out that the problem began when construction and demolition debris was diverted from the landfill where those materials normally are buried and instead were put into the municipal solid waste landfill…
…C&D debris can include drywall, which contains gypsum, a substance that can produce hydrogen sulfide gas when exposed to water or moisture under anaerobic conditions within municipal solid waste.
Source: Berkeley landfill mystery odor finally solved | Editorials | postandcourier.com
MinnPost file photo by Bill Kelley
Burying construction debris can dredge up naturally-occurring chemicals in the soil like arsenic and manganese that leach into groundwater after precipitation.
In order to catch up with demolition, Adams said he wants people who don’t deconstruct buildings to pay what he calls the “social costs” of carbon emissions to cities, which is the price of mitigating climate change. Reuse and recycle of construction waste cuts down on emissions in part because of the energy it takes to create new building materials. Adams pegged that carbon cost at roughly $9,000 for a typical house. He said cities should use that money to offer grants to homeowners who can’t pay for decon
Source: The problem, and politics, of throwing old houses in the garbage | MinnPost
Reclamation Administration: News and Research on Building Material Waste Prevention