In Greenland there has traditionally been limited waste management and this is due to several reasons; it's the small population and they have access to large areas, so it's kind of out of sight out of mind approach. But of course the environmental awareness has also increased in Greenland as all over the world so now there are other initiatives. So, the way it is in Greenland, they collect all the household waste in the towns and settlements, they separate some of the hazardous materials and also the metal waste. Then, all the collected waste is taken to the dump site as it's called in Greenland, which are uncontrolled disposal sites. And from there it's further managed. These uncontrolled disposal sites are are just disposal sites without lining barriers underneath, so there's no leachate collection. And there's no gas collection either, so all the emissions just go directly to the recipients. Each town and settlement has at least one of these dump sites. In the 1990s, the first waste strategy was implemented in Greenland, and the main focus here was to implement incineration in Greenland. And you could ask why incineration, and it's because Greenland is part of the Kingdom of Denmark and Denmark is one of the world leading countries in incineration. That's why that decision was taken. So, in the towns, larger incinerators were implemented and they have flue gas treatment where the fly ash is removed. This fly ash is collected and it's actually shipped off to an disposal, hazardous disposal sites in other countries. And this is actually quite expensive for the Greenlandic municipalities. The bottom ash is also collected and these are disposed of at the uncontrolled disposal sites, without further valorization. The heat is recovered from these incineration plants and it's distributed into the systems in the towns. And in the settlements, the incineration plants are much smaller. It's basically a large oven where the waste from the households is incinerated. And there is no flue gas treatment and the ashes are collected and also disposed of at the uncontrolled disposal sites. Even though the incineration has been implemented in Greenland, the waste is still piling up in a lot of places, and there are different reasons for this. First of all, these incinerators are modified versions of already known plans, but not for the purpose of waste incineration. For instance, in towns, some of the incinerators were made for biomass incineration which is much cleaner fuel than waste. Also, there is some difficulties with the capacity; there's either under or over capacity in these incinerators, and a large reason for this is that there's not enough data on how much waste it's actually produced in Greenland, so it's difficult to get the right size of your incinerator. And also you don't transport waste from one place to another because of the infrastructure. And if you have to have maintenance and repair on these incinerators, you might have to have the service personnel coming in from abroad and also the spare parts are coming from outside of Greenland and this is actually time-consuming, and you can have long down periods of the incinerators. Then you have the waste piling up back at these uncontrolled disposal sites. And the problems with the uncontrolled disposal sites without the emissions is also that you can have uncontrolled fires in the waste and spreading out of the waste by the wind. And this is visually not very favorable in this pristine environment, it doesn't give the right impression of this clean peaceful pristine country, especially to tourists. Within the last decades, has been implemented new waste strategies with new initiatives, and also with the focus on sorting of waste. And there has been some pilot projects that has been made, for instance by collecting glass and metal from household waste, because these can't burn. Also, composting of organic waste. And also to try and see if it's possible to transfer waste between different settlements, And actually this waste Greenland is quite advanced in the Arctic. Most other regions in the Arctic only have these uncontrolled disposal sites. But there's still room for improvements and innovative ideas in the Greenlandic waste management system.
