Not that kind of chocolate

“Does Nuuk have a chocolate factory?!” asked my son excitedly, having overheard a conversation between my husband and I.

“It’s not that kind of chocolate,” I replied.

“Oh,” he said, disappointed, realising what we were talking about.

The chocolate factory is the sewage pumping station on the southern end of a peninsula close to the centre of town. From there, the untreated waste is dumped into the sea close to shore. At least Nuuk has a plumbed sewage system, unlike Qaanaaq, where people have their waste collected by truck, or Kulusuk where it is collected by a guy with a wheelbarrow, or Qornoq – a settlement of summer houses in Nuuk fjord – where people take their own buckets of waste to the shore and dump it by hand into the sea at the water’s edge. But in fact, even in Nuuk there are parts of town that have no plumbed sewage, where a truck comes around weekly to pump out the waste and deliver it to the chocolate factory, which in turn delivers it to the sea.

On the other side of Nuuk, the city’s waste dump lies on the edge of the fjord. Sailing by, one should turn one’s head north toward the spectacular mountain and fjord scenery, if one wishes to avoid the view of scattered waste sprawling down the slope toward the water. While Greenland has a reputation for pristine Arctic scenery, when it comes to waste management, pristine is not the word I would use.

This contradiction was recently, finally, noticed by the international media. British Channel 4 journalist Alex Thomson, visiting Siorapaluk and Qaanaaq, noted that all waste – all of it – is dumped into pits on the beach. Even the local incinerator, which is not suitable for burning some types of waste, is no longer working. So everything, including human waste in plastic bags, lands on the beach where it washes directly into the sea. And as Thomson pointed out, similar problems affect all of Greenland.

We’ve seen this too. Visiting Atammik – a settlement about eighty kilometres north of Nuuk – my son and I explored the few streets and ended up, by chance, at the dump, a fetid-smelling wasteland on the edge of town. Rusted fridges and washing machines, piles of batteries leaking acrid fluid, coils of rusted wire, foul-smelling fuel drums, and piles of half-burned bin bags with their indiscriminate waste. Scraps of plastic and paper flitted in the breeze. The miscellaneous waste gathered volume as we decended the shallow slope toward a rocky inlet where the waves lapped at the burned remains and washed them in and out with the tide.