Getting rid of solid waste — trash, in a single word — is expensive in Alaska, particularly in Southeast communities that lack road access to haul and dump garbage in a nearby landfill.

“It’s a problem that’s never going away,” said Tom Wetor, director of Wrangell’s Public Works Department and a board member of the Southeast Alaska Solid Waste Authority, or SEASWA.

The collection of nine Southeast municipal governments, in conjunction with the Southeast Conference and a consultant, has been working the past 18 months to compile a report on trash disposal costs and challenges in every community in the region.

Funded by a $500,000 grant from the federally funded Denali Commission, they launched the Regional Municipal Solid Waste Management Study “to develop a comprehensive, collaborative and sustainable strategy for managing solid waste across the Southeast Alaska region.”

The goal is to “address the pressing challenges of rising disposal costs and inefficient waste management practices that have impacted community health, safety and the environment.”

Short- and long-range solutions could include more recycling, composting, shared contracting and equipment purchases to cut costs, burning trash to generate electricity, maybe someday setting up a regional landfill to save the expense of barging waste out of state.

“The intent of SEASWA is to reduce or stabilize cost through a combination of long-term disposal contracts and increased diversion through recycling.”

The draft report, which is available online at Toward a Cleaner Southeast Alaska, is out for public comment through Oct. 31.

The Southeast Conference said it wants feedback on the work done so far, which it will use “as we move toward a deeper dive.”

Wetor and the contractor on the project, Pat Cotter, from the Alaska offices of RESPEC, a global consultancy in environmental, lands, engineering and other areas, reported on their progress Oct. 1 at the Southeast Conference in Ketchikan. It’s an annual gathering of municipal, business and community leaders.

Cotter said he has been working the past 18 months “digging into” the problems and possible solutions for 35 Southeast communities, focusing on municipal solid waste, not industrial waste. RESPEC collected staffing levels, cost and volume numbers for each community, which are included in the draft report.

One of the problems in Southeast, he said, is the “huge geography” of disconnected communities.

Maybe the regional group, which currently is run by volunteers and has no paid staff, could negotiate collective trash-hauling contracts to get better rates, Cotter said, or maybe it could organize communities to use the same equipment to share spare parts to reduce costs.

Longer-term, the technology is advancing to cleanly and economically burn waste to generate electricity, Cotter said. “In the next 15 years, that is something that is going to be more viable than it is today.”

Today’s more workable ideas include recycling, when and where economically feasible, and fitting more waste into each container, which the Southeast Conference is trying to do with the tire shredder it purchased and shares around the region. Cutting up tires into smaller pieces reduces shipping costs.

The shredder started its career in Wrangell a few years ago and now is back in town, probably through the winter, after circulating around Southeast, Wetor said.

The Public Works Department director attended a recent meeting in Fairbanks, which included U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, to review trash handling across Alaska. “Everybody was at the table … we’re all dealing with the same things.”

Much of the solid waste produced in Southeast is barged out of state to Seattle, then hauled by rail to a private landfill in Eastern Washington. In Wrangell’s case, the borough paid close to $400,000 last year to transport its trash.

“We’re burying our trash in somebody else’s backyard,” Wetor said.

The total cost for collecting, packing and shipping Wrangell’s trash came to $1.2 million in 2025, according to the RESPEC community profile. The cost is covered by trash pickup fees and disposal costs charged to users.

The bill was almost $1.9 million in Petersburg, $6 million in Sitka and more than $1.5 million in Skagway.

Wrangell ships out more than 1,600 tons of waste a year, along with two 20-foot-long containers of household hazardous waste every year.

As costly as all that may seem, it’s a fraction of what it could cost to develop and operate an approved landfill for each community to avoid shipping its trash out of town. At an estimated development cost of $30 million, a landfill in Wrangell “is a non-starter,” Wetor said.

“Diversion, diversion, diversion is the thing we should be doing,” to reduce the volume of waste.

“The management and disposal of solid waste in Southeast Alaska have posed significant challenges for communities, including rising costs associated with transportation, operations and final disposal,” the draft report said.

Even larger communities face challenges, including the difficulty of managing an environmentally safe landfill in a region that receives heavy rainfall, or a landfill that is running out of room, which is Juneau’s impending problem at the privately owned fill that serves the community.