Arctic Scrap Adventure

It isn’t easy moving scrap from the frozen north of the Canadian Arctic to markets in the southern part of the country. That’s why it was so important to try.

By Avery Ascher

Last September, three old trucks were hauled into Mandak Metal Processors in Selkirk, Manitoba, a town just north of Winnipeg. The trio arrived chained and strapped to the back of a flatbed trailer, looking very end-of-life, with dented sides and shattered or missing glass. Two of the trucks had also been stuffed with miscellaneous ferrous scrap such as bent I-beams and motor blocks.
   Together, the trucks and additional scrap represented an 18-ton payload—not much in terms of volume or value in the bigger scrap picture. The real value of the shipment lay in its place of origin and the distance it traveled—beginning in Rankin Inlet in Canada’s arctic north and journeying some 900 miles by barge, rail, and truck to Selkirk. 
This epic scrap journey was, in fact, a pilot project. The project’s purpose was to find a cost-effective and feasible method of cleaning up piles of scrap metal that had accumulated across northern Canada over decades of mining and the construction of bridges, rail lines, roads, military installations, ferry landings, towns, and airports.
   The pilot project was conducted by North Central Development (Thompson, Manitoba), a federally funded community futures development corporation that has jump-started and supported a number of initiatives to manage waste in northern communities in recent years.

Costly Challenges
As you might expect, it’s no easy feat collecting and transporting metal from scrap piles and landfills in northern Manitoba and Nunavut, Canada’s newest northern territory. The challenges are numerous and daunting. Distance to scrap metal markets in southern Canada is the main problem, especially since such journeys can cover hundreds of miles from one town to another, with typically little but boreal forest in between. While trucking backhauls are an option—and great when you can arrange them—many trucking companies don’t like using containers that normally ship food items to bring back scrap metal.
   Another key challenge is that the transportation infrastructure throughout that part of Canada is either limited or no-frills. For instance, all-weather roads do not lead to all communities in the region. Instead, some communities can be reached in winter only over roads built across lake ice and muskeg (peatlands made up of bogs and fens), while in summer the only way in is by air. 
   Rail access is also limited to just certain communities, and such trips hardly qualify as express. It takes 36 hours, for example, to go from Winnipeg to Churchill, Manitoba, Canada’s only inland marine port on the west coast of Hudson Bay. 
   These factors not only increase the transportation costs for shipping material to end markets, they also make it expensive to ship and operate processing equipment up north. Moreover, various communities in the region lack sound waste management practices (though this is beginning to change), which also increases the time and cost required to sort material.

A Shared Vision
Given these constraints, moving scrap metal from Rankin Inlet to southern Manitoba might seem like a fool’s errand. As history has often shown, however, the flipside of “fool” can be “visionary.”
   In the arctic scrap metal pilot project, the role of visionary was shared by several communities, government agencies, private businesses, and individuals, all of whom decided it was time to do something about those northern scrap piles—for environmental reasons, to provide jobs, or just to reflect their pride in being northerners.
   If there was one critical key to the arctic scrap project’s success, 
it was the barge service between Rankin Inlet and Churchill provided by Moosonee Transportation Ltd. (Moosonee, Ontario). For Rankin Inlet and other hamlets along the west coast and inland of Hudson Bay—and, indeed, throughout the Canadian Arctic—barge companies provide an indispensable supply line that brings in goods from the south during the brief ice-free summer shipping season. Construction materials for housing, vehicles and heavy equipment, drums of diesel fuel and gasoline, computers, clothing, medical supplies, and staple food items like flour, sugar, and canned goods—almost anything you can name is hauled north by barge from June through October.
   Notably, when the barges return south, they have a lot of empty space on deck. That empty space—along with the need of arctic communities to get rid of their accumulated scrap metal—provided the foundation for the arctic scrap pilot project.

Planning and Partnering
Though the pilot project was first considered in 2002, it took two years to bring together the necessary partners, secure funding, outline roles, project timelines, ask for and return favors, play telephone tag, and run a small-scale test project in 2003. During that test, some residents of Rankin Inlet who were helping out flattened some old cars by running over them with a big loader, then stacked the hulks on a flatbed trailer provided by Gardewine North, a trucking company active throughout Manitoba, Ontario, and southeastern Saskatchewan.
   Truth be told, the Rankin Inlet helpers lacked both experience and the right equipment—which meant the test shipment “had quite a lean to it,” recalls Jim Farrell, Gardewine North’s northern regional operations manager. Still, the 2003 test shipment did not reveal any fatal flaws with the larger arctic scrap plan. So, as the 2004 shipping season arrived, pilot project members prayed for favorable weather.
   Finally, mid-September offered an ideal combination of good weather, calm waters, and all the necessary logistics. The three old trucks were strapped onto a 53-foot flatbed trailer from Gardewine North. The flatbed trailer, which had brought building materials north, offered the perfect backhaul opportunity.
   The trailer was then loaded onto the Moosonee Transportation barge together with 29 other derelict vehicles, and the barge set off south through the frigid water of Hudson Bay en route to Churchill. Gardewine and Moosonee often work together in this manner as part of a sealift transportation alliance that also includes the port of Churchill and the Hudson Bay Railway. 
   Though the additional derelict vehicles had been earmarked as part of the pilot shipment to Mandak Metal Processors, they had not been properly crushed—so the team left them at the scrap metal yard in Churchill for later transport.

Above and Beyond
When the three pilot-project trucks reached Churchill, Gardewine’s Jim Farrell spotted an opportunity to expand the effort. 
   “We kind of readjusted the load,” he explains. “We filled the boxes on the two trucks with motor blocks, things like that. We used our own imaginations.” 
   The result was a maximized 18-ton payload that went “above and beyond” what the project planners had expected—an effort that was truly appreciated given the logistical challenges.
   “Gardewine didn’t have to put that extra scrap into the two vehicles,” says Kim Hickes, the North Central Development official who coordinated the pilot project. She also praises Moosonee’s efforts in loading, offloading, and storing the scrap metal. “I don’t know how many times we heard, ‘The barge has been delayed,’” Hickes recounts. Though frustrating, such delays are routine in northern logistics due to bad weather, a death in the community, problems with satellite links, or any combination of these and other snags. 
   In this case, perseverance finally paid off, thanks to a great partnership all around, says Glen Flett, North Central Development’s chairperson. Once the barge docked in Churchill, the trailer was offloaded, reloaded onto a Hudson Bay Railway flatbed car, and shipped by rail to Thompson. 
   There, the flatbed was hitched to a Gardewine North truck and hauled down Highway 6 to Mandak Metal Processors in Selkirk, ending the scrap’s 900-mile odyssey via three different modes of transportation.
   In Selkirk, North Central Development got a pleasant surprise that served as a fitting end to the group’s hard work on the project: Instead of the $90 (Canadian) a ton Mandak had originally quoted for the scrap, the firm paid $110 a ton on delivery.

Just the First Step
So was the arctic scrap pilot project a success? For North Central Development, the project was just one step toward the greater, long-term goal of cleaning up northern scrap piles. Overcoming the odds of distance and cost in one community can help convince others that such efforts are feasible (see “Another Arctic Answer” on page 56). The key, according to Tim Johnson, North Central Development’s manager, is a template adaptable to each community, using winter roads, barge, rail—whatever access works for each community. 
   The need to expand this effort is clear even to the trucking firm Gardewine North, which is fairly certain it lost money on the 2003 test project. “You gotta try,” says Gardewine’s Jim Farrell. “I’ve been to all those communities up north, and the places are laden with old aluminum and fridges and stoves. Up there on the tundra, what are they going to do if we don’t help them and get their stuff to a recycling spot?” 
   The business landscape in northern Canada is changing, both literally and figuratively. It used to be that big companies would come into northern Canadian communities like Rankin Inlet, take what they wanted, and then get out. 
   But today’s savvy recycler—someone who is genuinely interested in working with local communities, 
piggybacking, and horse-trading with like-minded colleagues—can also reach these remote locations. The difference lies in the environmental legacy they leave behind.
   The arctic scrap project is just beginning, with two barge runs from Nunavut to Churchill projected this year, plus plans to eventually establish a baling operation in Churchill. Recycling scrap metal from Canada’s far north is coming of age, and sooner or later it’s going to make money. 
   “From what I’m hearing, it’s going to grow,” concludes Farrell. 

Another Arctic Answer
The town of Gillam—the last remaining company-owned town in Manitoba, with an economy based on hydroelectric power generation—sits 640 miles northeast of Winnipeg, along the Hudson Bay Railway line between Thompson and Churchill. Due to its location, Gillam had once been considered a participant for the arctic scrap metal pilot project, but there was one big obstacle, notes Jackie Clayton, Gillam’s chief administrative officer. 
   “We don’t use rail much, we use road,” explains Clayton. “We would have had to build loading docks to take advantage of rail and then try to coordinate it with Churchill.” 
   So the town devised a Gillam-specific solution to its overburdened landfill. Working with North Central Development, the town contracted Right Way Recyclers, a private recycling company from Winnipeg, to clean up the site and haul everything away.
   First, though, George Kopec, manager of Right Way, went up to Gillam to have a look. As a scrap industry veteran, he’d seen his share of challenging scrap, so he wanted to know what he was getting into.
“It was pretty much straightforward, except for the garbage, tires, and propane tanks,” Kopec recalls of his initial reconnaissance. He estimated that the site contained about 1,000 tons of material. “There were a lot of trailer frames. I knew we needed a shear to cut them up and handle them properly. I knew we’d also need a roll-off truck.”
   There was one challenge Kopec hadn’t counted on, however—temperatures in late November 2004 that fell as low as -40 degrees F, plus three to four feet of snow. Northern Manitoba doesn’t normally see that sort of weather until January.
   Despite these rough conditions, Right Way got the job done thanks to its hard-working crew and its equipment, which included an excavator with a hydraulic thumb, a shear, a 40-inch electromagnet, and a baler. It was a pricey job, though, in terms of diesel fuel that cost about $2.80 (U.S.) a gallon over 12-hour days.
   But that’s just the nature of business, including the recycling business, in northern Manitoba. At least Right Way found some backhaul opportunities to ship scrap from Gillam to Winnipeg by partnering with three Manitoba firms that had delivered material to Gillam for the power company.
   “We just told them, ‘If you’re in the area, by all means, pick up some scrap for us,’” Kopec notes. 
Overall, Kopec had a positive experience cleaning up Gillam’s scrap. “The community liked us working there,” he says. “They were very friendly and helpful. They appreciated us there. That’s a great feeling.” 

Avery Ascher is a writer based in The Pas, Manitoba.