Residents who recently went to the Unalaska landfill likely noticed crushed cars on the side of the road. Now the cars are on a barge, destined for Seattle to be recycled. The barge docked across from the local dump on June 5.
“It is planned to have approximately 1,200 tons of scrap metal and about 250 vehicles on board to leave,” said Erik Hernandez, the City of Unalaska’s director of public utilities.
Hernandez said that over the last few years, abandoned cars have started stacking up on private lots and roadsides and leaking fluid into the environment — basically creating a nuisance for locals. So the city did a preliminary count of all the junked cars.
“It was over 100 vehicles that we had pre-identified, ready to go as abandoned, ready to be taken care of,” Hernandez said.
The city’s solution is a project called DRIVE. It’s short for Developing Recycling Infrastructure and Vehicle End-Of-Life. The plan came together in 2024 and was approved by the City Council in January 2025.
Since then, the city collected the abandoned cars, drained their fluids, handled the paperwork and hauled them to the landfill, where they’d eventually be shipped off island.
In December, the project got a major financial boost. Unalaska was selected for a $3.8 million grant from the federal Environmental Protection Agency to keep the work going.
Hernandez said the money will offset the high cost of moving metal off the island and pay for recycling upgrades and new equipment, starting with a metal compactor.
“The unit we specced out, it was a clamshell design that basically smashes the vehicle height-wise. Then there’s a sideways ram that makes it into a block,” he said.
Hernandez said the compactor saves space at the landfill and turns loose scrap into a manageable size that the city can reliably measure. Once the new equipment is delivered, the city owns it outright, he said.
“Our hope is to be able to provide the community with better recycling options, as well as sorting,” Hernandez said.
And on an island where landfill space is limited, better sorting means less trash gets buried and more of it can be recycled or shipped off.
To help fill the barge, the city offered a discount on scrap-metal and vehicle disposal, April 1-May 30. Hernandez said locals brought in roughly 300 tons.
For more information on how to get rid of a car, contact Unalaska’s Public Utilities at 907-581-1260. To get rid of scrap metal, contact Unalaska’s Solid Waste Division at 907-581-5757. Or email at scrap@unalaska.gov.
