Capitol Disposal Landfill: Juneau has to put its garbage somewhere.

• Author: Rhode, Scott

Juneau adorns the margin between Gastineau Channel and the Boundary Range like a string of pearls. The pendant in the middle is Lemon Creek, a residential neighborhood that also includes the Costco and Home Depot stores, the state prison, and the midtown industrial hub. The jewel in that pendant, though, clashes with the capital city's gorgeous setting: it's the town dump.

"Southeast is a lousy place to try to develop a landfill," says Richard Stokes, a retired solid waste specialist. "In most places, you don't have the soils. You don't have the cover material. And there are sensitive streams close by."

Stokes is amazed that, in fifty years, Capitol Disposal Landfill (CDL) has never posed a crisis for Lemon Creek or the wetlands at the stream's mouth, just outside the fence. Which is fortunate because alternatives are limited.

"If not in Lemon Creek, where else do you put it?" he asks. "The general area that kept coming up for discussion (although vaguely, in most cases) was farther up the Lemon Creek Valley, more out of sight--which I always thought was a terrible idea because it's almost impossible to not have a water quality problem with the garbage."

The purity of Lemon Creek Valley is vitally important to Dominic Di Laurenzio, owner of Alaska Pure Mountain Spring Water. Bottling water from a source upstream of the landfill, Di Laurenzio tests the quality weekly. "It's just regular artesian spring water, so you don't have to do anything to it except just filter it," he says. "Make sure all the crud is out of it."

The bottling plant in the Lemon Creek industrial zone is conveniently close to CDL. "I just did a dump run last Friday. Loaded it up, and then it was like a two-minute drive to the landfill," Di Laurenzio says.

Yes, he does notice the smell. "From the highway, probably as bad or worse than over where my water plant is," he says.

Lisa Daugherty also owns a business in the Lemon Creek neighborhood. "There are certain times of the year when you're coming to the Vanderbilt intersection where it stinks and it's embarrassing," she says. "But it's like, that's where the landfill is. Nobody made that decision yesterday."

Who Made That Decision?

Lemon Creek has been home to Juneau's landfill since before the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) existed to regulate it. When DEC formed in 1971, Stokes was there, first as a pesticide specialist and switching to solid waste in 1975.

"The way it was done was, you know, dump it somewhere," he says, referring to the early practice of dumping on the beach. "That was not uncommon. I don't think that people gave much thought to garbage dumps."

News reports in the Alaska Daily Empire circa 1916 corroborate Stokes' recollection. Rhys Coffee of Juneau, who is compiling a master's thesis on solid waste management for the University of Washington, unearthed historic articles that describe trash piled on the beach. One proposed solution was to haul the load offshore and dump it in deeper water. Coffee says it's unclear if that ever happened.

Also unclear...