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Churchill’s Famous Polar Bears Left to Eat Trash
The white bear is hungry. She leads her two cubs closer to the electrified fence, thrusting her nose to catch a whiff of decaying food. The bear circles the perimeter in search of scraps swept by winter winds beyond the fence. For weeks, the mother bear has been teaching her cubs to forage among the refuse piled on the tundra.
Key points- After its waste facility burned down, Churchill struggles to keep polar bears out of its garbage
- Late freeze ups of the Hudson Bay contribute to more bears staying longer near town
- Proposed waste management solutions are expensive in remote Northern communities
The scene of Canada’s iconic polar bears scrounging among chip bags and milk jugs stands in stark contrast to the majestic images of bears traversing the sub-Arctic shores that feature in global tourism campaigns for the Hudson Bay region. It’s a sore point for the town of Churchill, Manitoba. For nearly two years now, the “Polar Bear Capital of the World” that welcomes international photographers and tourists as “one of the best places” to see wild polar bears has been the site of a markedly ugly scene: bears scrounging for human garbage.
In April 2024, Churchill’s waste management facility—an old military building known as L5—burned to the ground. Spontaneous combustion in the gaseous garbage pile was the likely cause. The warehouse had been capable of storing up to three years’ worth of the town’s garbage at a time. Overnight, the town’s 900 or so residents were left with nothing. Garbage piled up in town. Dumpsters overflowed.
In the wake of the fire, the town was forced to dump all of its waste on top of the tundra, on an old landfill, about six kilometres from the L5 site, where a hard fence and an electric fence kept the bears at bay. It remains a tenuous stopgap. By that fall, as hundreds of hungry polar bears arrived on the shore of Hudson Bay to wait for the sea ice to freeze, an inconvenience had turned into a crisis. Bears congregated at the fence line, biding their time. When an ice storm fatefully knocked out the fence’s power supply, more than thirty ravenous polar bears stormed the enclosure to gorge on the garbage.
“Once bears access human foods, they become much more difficult to manage,” says Geoff York, vice president of science and policy for the conservation nonprofit Polar Bear International. Long-standing efforts by conservation officers to keep polar bears away from the townsite, hazing them down the coast, are now in jeopardy. “This makes that job both more difficult and more dangerous.”
After two years, Churchill is still without a solution. The Manitoba government did not respond to requests for an interview. The town is looking at replacing the old waste storage building with a steel option, but cost (hindered by price hikes for steel due to the United States’ tariffs) and uncertainty around the location have stalled the decision. In the meantime, camera traps set up around Churchill’s makeshift facility filmed polar bears—lone males, females with cubs, subadults—trying their luck almost every single day this past fall, scientists say.
Polar Bear outside the electric fence surrounding the local dump, going through the garbage. Churchill, Manitoba, Canada. (© Daniel J. Cox/naturalexposures.com)“When you’re coexisting with bears, cleanliness is paramount for safety,” says Drew Hamilton, a guide with Discover Churchill tours who leads visitors around the region in a van to see bears. “As somebody who derives most of my income from the polar bears here, I see it as disrespectful to the bears themselves. This town owes a lot to these bears. We should be doing all we can to support them and take better care of them.”
Canada’s northern communities have long struggled to deal with the waste they produce. As Indigenous diets have shifted toward more pre-packaged food shipped in from the south, infrastructure to accept the non-degradable remains has not kept pace. Permanently frozen ground or bedrock makes it impossible to dig traditional cap-and-fill landfills wherein garbage is buried and covered over. Thawing permafrost, meanwhile, can leech toxins and pollutants into the ground. For that reason, many of Canada’s Arctic communities rely on open-air dumps where trash is simply stored on the surface.
Churchill, which sits on the rocky Canadian Shield and overruns stretches of muskeg and permafrost, had been the exception. In 2005, the town closed its surface dump, in operation since the 1950s. A 1971 article in the New York Times describes twenty-four polar bears air-lifted and relocated out of the town. “The garbage dumps at Churchill and nearby Fort Churchill, a military installation, have become happy hunting grounds for the Arctico bears,” the article read. “Townsmen, bothered by the bears wandering their streets, had felt it better, easier and cheaper to move the animals than the dumps.”
The town was fortunate to have a surplus of abandoned military buildings leftover from its time as a strategic World War II listening post to track submarines and as a military base during the Cold War. Officials repurposed the hangars to lock away trash (one also became a polar bear “jail”), establishing a protected recycling centre and hazardous materials centre. The change also coincided with a growing number of foreign visitors eager to glimpse the white bears. While the town may have been able to handle its own garbage, dealing with the waste of the now 25,000 annual visitors—much of which is food scraps—is another matter.
Susan Maxson, a contractor for Churchill focused on infrastructure issues, began looking into what could be done to address waste management. Her recommendation in early 2024—just before the fire—was to invest in a composter that could handle food waste, as well as a waste-to-heat incinerator that would use the derived energy to warm the town’s potable water supply, preventing it from freezing as it traveled through underground pipelines.
But the cost of the system—around $11 million, with an estimated annual running cost of $500,000—was “shocking to us,” says Jessica Power, chief administrative officer for the town of Churchill. The running costs took incineration off the table, but Power says the town still has it as the long-term goal and hopes to obtain new quotes. The town did manage to secure a supplier for a new composter, with a provincial grant through the Climate Action Fund providing half the $300,000 required. “That takes stuff out of the garbage that is attractive to bears,” Maxson says. The problem is that, after the fire, the town has nowhere to store the new composter. “It’s a mess.”
Provincial regulations have created more red tape for the tiny town. Manitoba now requires new landfills to use a synthetic liner to prevent hazardous toxins from leaching into soil and groundwater rather than rely on permafrost as a natural liner, as was done before the fire. “You have to go in and dig it all up and put a synthetic liner down, and that requires engineering. It’s an investment,” Power says. “A lot of the legislation is written in the south, for the south. It doesn’t always take into consideration the additional challenges and difficulties that we face in the north.”
While some hazardous materials (propane tanks, paint cylinders, and the like) and metal waste are being shipped out of Churchill by train (the community has no road connection), Maxson worries about the location of the interim dump. It’s small and will eventually run out of room, she says. Plus, the area lacks cell coverage. “If you send a guy out there, and his truck breaks down,” she says, “he’s got to walk from the landfill up the hill to the road through a bear corridor.”
Polar bears caught on camera in October 2025 approaching Churchill’s trash dump site from outside the fenced landfill. (Image courtesy of Polar Bears International)In a good year, polar bears head out on Hudson Bay around early November, passing through the Churchill area on their way to the ice. But the sea ice has been melting earlier and taking longer to freeze up, and so hungry bears are spending an additional three to four weeks every year on shore without food. In 2025, according to Polar Bears International, Western Hudson Bay saw its second longest ice-free period since record keeping began in 1979. Bears weren’t able to begin moving offshore until late November. Hungry bears were left wandering the Bay’s shores, becoming less risk averse as they grew more desperate to find food. Since the 1980s, the population of polar bears living in the Western Hudson Bay region has fallen by roughly half, from 1,185 bears to just 618.
“Even once they could get offshore, it was just very slow,” says Andrew Derocher, a polar bear biologist at the University of Alberta. One saving grace, he adds, was that the bears came off the ice this past spring with decent body fat stored up, indicating a successful seal hunting season. That, he says, would help them to buffer the costs of a late freeze up.
Food-stressed male polar bears are the most likely to attack humans, according to a 2017 study. An open dump—providing a measure of hope to starving bears—means larger numbers of polar bears are now hanging around Churchill. It’s a problem not isolated to Manitoba. One 2022 study in the journal Oryx, co-authored by Derocher and York, found that more and more polar bears across the Arctic are turning to garbage dumps to fill their stomachs as their habitat disappears, leading to conflicts with people.
“We’re just hoping we can hold the line,” York says. The town has taken to storing some additional waste in its equipment maintenance building. Some residents have been holding onto their trash indoors for longer periods. Since the 2024 breakdown, Polar Bears International has reinforced its electric fence, providing it with a larger power source. The nonprofit also purchased six new large, bear-resistant bins to place around town, bringing the total to thirty-two. And Churchill has invested in a new garbage truck to securely collect trash.
But residents still worry. “I’ve got a three-year-old daughter. And we live on the last road in town,” Hamilton says. “We have a tendency to have more overflowing dumpsters. And now you have more bears around town that are being attracted to poorly managed trash.”
Hamilton, who previously worked in brown bear tourism in Alaska, worries about the optics for visitors. On his Discover Churchill tours, he says he now makes it a point to take people out to the dump site. “People need to know what’s going on behind the scenes that provide them with this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.” Tourists, he says, are “genuinely surprised that a place that calls itself the ‘Polar Bear Capital of the World’ wouldn’t have their shit together enough to let this continue.” There’s much at stake. “Bears in Churchill are a $100 million dollar a year brand for the Province of Manitoba. You’re devaluing the brand that people have spent decades creating.”
Churchill mayor Mike Spence tells The Walrus the town hopes to come up with a new plan for trash management later this year. This will include cleanup of the now-toxic burn site, a new structure to accommodate the composter, as well as other waste collected in the winter seasons that can’t be covered or transported. “That’s part of living in the North,” he notes. “At the end of the day, we’ll work toward a solution that other northern communities can follow suit. We’re keeping in mind the importance of doing it right.”
It’s not clear where the money will come from. The insurance claim process for the lost facility has been drawn out and the payout will fall short of covering rebuilding costs. Considering the town’s small tax base, some have floated the idea of increasing the accommodation levy on tourists—currently at 5 percent—to pay for additional waste management. “They just have no other near-term option without serious federal or provincial support,” York says. The former makes sense to many, as the federal government is considering other major infrastructure investments in Churchill.
Last year, Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government proposed several large nation-building projects to boost Canada’s economic independence and reduce reliance on the United States. One of those projects is the Port of Churchill Plus, which aspires to revitalize the region’s deepwater port, expand trade corridors with an all-weather road and upgraded rail line, and implement marine ice-breaking capacity.
A government spokesperson says Canada’s Major Projects Office is currently working with the Government of Manitoba, proponents, and Indigenous peoples on the strategy. The government would not comment on whether waste management would be considered “to avoid influencing potential decisions and to respect sensitive ongoing discussions.”
“Waste management should be part and parcel of those projects that are especially focused in the North,” York says. “Churchill is a perfect case where to grow the port, to add a military presence back to Churchill, to have increased rail transport—all of those things are going to bring more people.” And more people means more trash. Unless the town can soon find a solution to its garbage woes, more trash means more hungry bears lingering nearby, hoping for a lucky break.
The post Churchill’s Famous Polar Bears Left to Eat Trash first appeared on The Walrus.
Unpublished Newswire
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