Your freezer breaks and you need a part. You could go to the store or online. Or you could go to the landfill. And that’s what people in Bethel have done for decades— salvaging and reusing what other people have thrown away. Now, the city is saying no more.
Tom McCallson is a Bethel resident and landfill scavenger.
“There’s a mass of copper there that needs to be cut up and put into totes. You can see there’s a pile of aluminum there,” McCallson said as copper clanged around him. “This is the big stuff here. Flanges, stuff out of big buildings. Anytime they renovate a building, they cut out all this stuff and throw it away. So it goes into the dump in mass piles.”
McCallson lives off the Bethel grid—a property scattered with old vehicles, machines, and piles of metal. There are multiple workshops, a kiln for melting and casting metal. And that roar in the background—that’s a generator from a combo solar and wind power source McCallson built himself. He’s used to building his own things. And the landfill has always been a ready source of materials.
“We joke as we drive by that it’s the store,” McCallson said. “It’s where people go to shop.”
Or it was.
At the beginning of June, Bethel City Manager Ann Capela wrote a memo. It read: “My direction was that no one can remove any city property. Once something is deposited in the landfill, it becomes city property.”
And city property, Capela said, has a specific way of being disposed of under city law. Anything under $5,000 has to be sold at public auction. Anything over that amount has to get approval from City Council to be sold. Just taking things at will isn’t an option. Capela also sees a larger issue with people scrounging in the landfill.
There are a lot of hazardous materials there,” Capela said. “There’s iron sticking out. There is sharp objects. There’s broken glass.”
Capela sees all that risk creating liability for the city.
But stuff from the Bethel landfill shows up everywhere. People strip parts for vehicles. They take wood for heating or to build fish camps. Right now it’s popular for people to take broken concrete blocks to weigh down fish nets.
David Stovner is the Bethel Landfill Manager. When asked if he knew of anyone who’d been hurt while salvaging he said negative.
“If they have, they haven’t complained to the city about it,” Stovner said. “It’s always been our policy up here to let people salvage stuff as long as they’re not being stupid about it.”
Stovner has had to tell incoming scavengers that they can’t scavenge anymore.
“I say it’s been cut off. If you take it you’re stealing from the city,” Stovner said. “They say that’s stupid. We’ve always done this. For the most part people respect that and turn around and leave. I’m sure there’s some people who still take stuff. But I’m one person up here.”
Which means a lot of time, no one’s watching. There’s lunch at noon. After lunch, there’s pushing dirt over the landfill. And there’s all that time between 5 o’ clock at night and 8 o’ clock in the morning when no one’s on duty. But Stovner said that doesn’t mean people aren’t there.
“It’s been traditional that people will sneak over the berm, or you can go around the gate, you know,” Stovner said. “It’s not that secure. It’s not Fort Knox by any means.”
There’s only a chain link fence and no cameras between an old Bethel tradition and this new enforcement. Stovner said he’s had to turn away almost 100 people so far, but in the morning when he gets to work, he sees tracks.
City Manager Capela said the City Council will have to change the law to change her position.
Anna Rose MacArthur is a reporter at KYUK in Bethel.
