Resolving rural trash trouble: for rural residents, it's not so easy to take out the garbage.

• Author: Hill, Robin Mackey
• Position: Rural waste disposal

For Port Alsworth resident Glen Alsworth, taking out the trash means triple-bagging his family's refuse and heaving it into his twin engine Beechcraft 18 cargo plane for the trip across Cook Inlet. "I fly it all to Anchorage," says Alsworth. "That's where we buy it from, so it only seems fair to return it. I think several other residents are doing that, too."

For the air taxi operator and lodge owner, flying 100 to 150 pounds of garbage to his Merrill Field office each week is just another cost of doing business. Besides, there's no landfill in Port Alsworth, a small community of 55 residents on the eastern shores of Lake Clark. Those who don't fly their garbage out are forced to deal with it any way they can, which for many, Alsworth suspects, means tossing it out the back door and into a pit on their own property. "It's all private land around here," he says. "Everyone wants a landfill, but they don't want it on their property."

For Alsworth and the rest of the Lake & Peninsula Borough's 1,700 residents, dealing effectively -- and safely -- with everything from disposable juice containers and aluminum cans to scrap metal and dead car batteries is a growing concern. And although Alsworth and others reuse, recycle, burn, crush, compact and compost what they can, there are still certain things that simply won't go away. On occasion, Alsworth has flown as much as 1,000 pounds of trash into Anchorage in order to help his neighbors dispose of their refuse.

No Programs for Solid Waste. "One of the things that hit me when I first came out here and began visiting the communities was that they really don't have much way to take care of solid wastes," says borough manager Glen Vernon. Most of the communities have trash troubles -- where to put it, how to reduce the amount of it and how to deal with hazardous materials that, if improperly handled, could have a dangerous affect on the town's drinking water.

"It was a really serious situation," says Vernon of the borough-wide problem. "There's a high level of concern." As a result, figuring out how best to deal with the region's trash has become a top priority for the borough.

In an attempt to get a grasp on the problem -- and to come up with workable solutions that could help other rural communities -- the borough received a $50,000 matching grant to study all aspects of solid waste, including everything from recycling to landfill management. The money, administered by the nonprofit Southwest Alaska...