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.

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.