By JILL FANKHAUSER
Alaska Star

If you want to dye your hair champagne-blonde, skip the hairdresser and head to the hazardous waste facility at the Anchorage Regional Landfill off Hiland Road.

It might seem like an odd place to shop, but everything is free. Shoppers can find items like hair dye, wood stain, household cleaner, paint, bug repellant, weed killer and wallpaper glue behind the counter in the hazardous waste building.

“The idea is to give people a place to get rid of things,” said Mark Madden, director of Solid Waste Services for the Municipality of Anchorage. “Ordinarily, people might dump things like paint down the drain or in a hole behind the shed.”

Mark Madden, director of solid waste services for the Municipality of Anchorage, checks out the shelves or reusable items available free to the public at the Anchorage Landfill. "The price is right," he said. Star Photo by Jill Fankhauser

“Just about any and everything you see on the shelves at the hardware or grocery store - some it’s hazardous, some of it isn’t,” Madden said.

The Anchorage Regional Landfill doesn’t have a place to disposes of hazardous waste. Madden said there are specific design requirements to operate a hazardous waste landfill, and because of Alaska’s low volume of hazardous waste, it’s cheaper and easier to barge it Outside than to build a facility.

But the best way to keep things off the barge or out of the landfill is to give them away.

“The first goal when we get items at the center is try to put things out for reuse, because that costs them nothing,” Madden said.

A contract company, Emerald Alaska, which takes in all the materials, runs the center. They oversee each item that comes in and determines if it can be shelved or disposed.

Several safe and unused consumer products are given away at the counter inside the center. Last year, 12,000 containers crossed the counter to consumers willing to reuse products they found at the hazardous waste center.

Shoppers just need to sign a form releasing the city from any liability. The form essentially says customers can’t sue the municipality for damages if something goes wrong. The staff goes by what the label says is inside the bottle or bucket.

Items that won’t go back to the public include things found in methamphetamine labs such as red phosphorous powder from matchstick heads or cyanide and hydrochloric from professional laboratories.

The hazardous waste center does all it can to keep items in Alaska by hardening things like latex paint or wallpaper glue to make it suitable to go into a landfill.

Products that cannot be hardened, such as acids or flammable chemicals, are packed in drums filled with an absorbent mineral called vermiculite and be shipped out to a hazardous waste landfill in Washington.

While they wait for the barge, highly volatile materials are stored in their own rooms with steel garage doors separating poisons from flammable and other toxic materials. If there were an emergency, the doors would come down to keep each room apart so chemicals wouldn’t mix. Firefighters or hazardous material teams could then enter rooms though an outside entrance to each area.

So far, since the center opened in 1991, there have been no accidents or need to call for help, Madden said.

“We’ve had a few things dropped off here that scare the heck out of us, but we’ve never had any issues with the building,” Madden said.

It’s almost impossible to predict what’s going to come through the door - whether its flammable poisons or a bucket of wallpaper glue - but it’s all part of a day’s work.

Residents can dispose 40 pounds of hazardous waste at the center for free, and can bring an additional five gallons of used oil to be recycled.

There are two drop sites for hazardous waste in the municipality. The Anchorage Central Waste Transfer Station at 1111 E. 56th Avenue in Anchorage or the Anchorage Landfill off Hiland Road.

Shoppers can see what’s available at each facility. The transfer station center is open Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. The main landfill is open Tuesday through Saturday, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Reach the reporter at jillfankhauser.@alaskastar.com.

This article published in The Alaska Star on Thursday, July 9, 2009.