Old Town landfill expansion bid is no surprise, but waste-wary locals continue fight

OLD TOWN, Maine — The Maine Department of Environmental Protection expects to decide by the end of the month whether tripling the capacity of state-owned Juniper Ridge Landfill would benefit the public, allowing the expansion application to move forward.

Landfill officials say the state must act quickly because Maine is running out of room for waste. This is a familiar argument. When the state signed a 30-year deal in 2004 handing control of the landfill over to Casella Waste Systems Inc., it did so knowing Casella eventually would need more room. In fact, the company applied for an expansion in 2009, but withdrew the application in the face of questions from the DEP.

Controversy persists over the waste that’s forcing the proposed expansion and where that trash is coming from.

Don Meagher, manager of planning and development for Casella, said in a November interview that the landfill in Old Town is projected to be filled to capacity in less than five years. The entirety of Maine’s landfill space is expected to be used up within the decade, according to Meagher.

When Casella, which operates the landfill for the state, started operations at Juniper Ridge eight years ago, it expected the landfill would be full around 2018. It’s filling up more quickly than planned.

Casella calculated capacity estimates in 2004 using a landfill cell construction method that saved space. However, that technique proved to be too expensive, so Casella stopped using it, according to Meagher.

Further, Meagher said the closure of Hampden’s Pine Tree Landfill in 2009 has sped up the fill rate because waste that would have gone to Hampden now has to come to Old Town. Also, changes in state regulations mean more treatment plant sludge has to be landfilled.

Casella and the State Planning Office, which oversees waste management for the state, argue that the state needs somewhere to put its trash, sludge waste from paper mills and construction demolition debris — and soon.

Casella is seeking to increase the Juniper Ridge footprint by 143 acres.

As the DEP considers the expansion proposal, letters and comments are flowing in from members of the public, municipalities, politicians and businesses. More than 60 had been submitted by early January. Most letters decry Casella’s waste management practices and call for a denial of the proposed expansion. Some have accused Casella of filling Juniper Ridge with waste from other states and charged that some Casella-owned companies haven’t been as efficient or effective in recycling as they should be.

Casella and representatives of businesses that benefit from a centrally located landfill, on the other hand, argue that if Juniper Ridge shuts down in five or so years once it’s full, a variety of jobs, including those in the trucking, landfill and waste-to-energy sectors, will be lost — something the state can’t afford to have happen.

Other states’ trash

Much of the opposition to the expansion revolves around out-of-state waste, with many arguing that if Maine took in less trash from other states, there wouldn’t be a need for new landfill space.

“Out-of-state waste is such a minor component of all this,” Meagher said. “They’re looking for a bogeyman that isn’t there.”

There is no out-of-state waste in Juniper Ridge Landfill, according to state statute.

“Waste that is generated within the State includes residue and bypass generated by incineration, processing and recycling facilities within the State or waste whether generated within the State or outside of the State if it is used for daily cover, frost protection or stability or is generated within 30 miles of the solid waste disposal facility,” according to the statute enacted by the 123rd Maine Legislature in 2007.

In more than a year’s worth of waste activity reports, which Casella is required to submit to the State Planning Office and DEP, not a single truck among the thousands that bring waste to the facility each month came directly to Juniper Ridge from another state.

But of the more than 100 trucks and trailers that roll through the Juniper Ridge weigh station on an average day, some bear license plates or company names from other states.

According to Meagher, out-of-state plates don’t prove that trucks are coming directly from another state to Juniper Ridge without first stopping at a processing facility. A non-Maine license plate means only that the truck wasn’t registered in Maine by the company that owns it.

The drivers of several of these trucks confirmed that they mostly operated in Maine or had dropped off a load at one of Maine’s waste processing facilities — where the trash, by definition, becomes in-state waste — before picking up another load to take to the landfill.

Maine’s major waste processors include KTI Bio Fuels Inc. in Lewiston, which sorts construction and demolition debris and chips up the wood for use as fuel in boilers; Aggregate Recycling Corp. in Eliot, which recycles soil and construction and demolition debris; J.A. Sampson Inc. in Sanford, which makes mulch and recycles wood; and A.L. Murphy Inc. in Naples.

Other companies are licensed to process waste but aren’t active in the industry.

Trash is processed at these facilities when it has been “mechanically or chemically altered in some way,” according to state Rep. Bob Duchesne, D-Hudson, a member of the Legislature’s Environment and Natural Resources Committee.

The practice of converting out-of-state waste to in-state waste didn’t start with the recent statute — it has been an accepted waste management practice for decades.

“We’re approaching 25 years of historical practice, which people erroneously think is somehow a recent development,” Meagher said.

Decades of waste worries

Where did this definition distinguishing in-state waste from out-of-state waste come from?

Maine’s waste management policy began to take shape in the 1980s. Soaring heating oil and gasoline prices that resulted from the 1973 oil embargo still were fresh in the minds of Mainers — spurring a desire to develop trash-to-energy facilities to ease the sting. Trash was dumped in hundreds of unlined landfills, usually owned by municipalities, some of which would burn the trash to make way for more.

In 1989, the Legislature banned new or expanded commercial landfills and formed the Waste Management Agency to reduce the environmental hazards and get Maine’s waste practices under control.

Sherry Huber was the agency’s executive director.

Huber said during an interview in December that the Waste Management Agency was “very successful” in many regards. It established a waste management hierarchy — reduce, reuse, recycle, compost, waste-to-energy and, lastly, landfill — to guide the state in prioritizing its methods of waste management.

It eliminated private landfills, halting several proposals around that time to place more landfills in Maine that could have drawn more trash across state borders.

In 1995, the agency identified land at Carpenter Ridge, west of Lincoln, where the state hoped to place the first state-owned landfill. That project, however, was sidelined in 2004 when the state and Old Town’s failing Georgia-Pacific paper mill completed a $26 million deal that gave the state control of Juniper Ridge Landfill — which, under Casella, transformed from a paper mill dump to a more general-use landfill. Georgia-Pacific folded two years later.

After acquiring Carpenter Ridge and doing what it could to prevent future privately owned landfills, the state abolished the Waste Management Agency in 1995, and the State Planning Office took over its duties.

But the Waste Management Agency had one major goal it couldn’t reach, Huber said. It couldn’t slow the flow of waste coming to Maine from other states.

Free trade of trash

Out-of-state waste is no new phenomenon, Huber said, and the Waste Management Agency and state recognized early on that the fact that other states were sending construction and demolition debris and other waste to the Pine Tree State could lead to an overcrowding problem in Maine’s landfills.

When lawyers looked into ways to regulate the amounts and types of trash coming into the state, they hit a barrier the agency couldn’t overcome — the Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution, which gives the federal government — not states — the authority to regulate commerce between states.

The agency believed that an attempt to cut down the amount of waste flowing into Maine might lead to a federal case, so it left the matter alone, Huber said.

Because the state couldn’t stop out-of-state waste from coming into Maine, it at least had to clarify what in-state waste meant so it could better monitor what was being disposed of in Maine landfills.

In 2007, the Legislature passed the revision to state statute in an effort to create a “clear picture” of what in-state waste was, as well as what would be allowed to go into state-owned landfills such as Juniper Ridge, according to Paula Clark of the DEP.

She said state officials didn’t want Maine to become the Northeast’s “dumping ground.”

Before the statute’s approval, Clark said, it was widely accepted by the waste management industry that ash from boilers at energy recovery plants and other products processed at waste facilities became Maine’s responsibility once businesses drew some benefit from the garbage.

The statute’s aim was to make that practice official, according to Clark.

“[Critics of the state’s waste management policy] may not agree with the statutory direction that was taken,” Clark said. “But at least it was more clear.”

Landfills on the horizon?

For the bulk of this decade, Juniper Ridge will be the only state-owned landfill in Maine capable of taking in a substantial amount of waste.

Pine Tree Landfill in Hampden stopped taking in waste in late 2009. Today, it acts as a collection site for hazardous waste, such as mercury switches and fluorescent lights, which it ships to out-of-state hazardous waste sites. The facility also collects and burns methane from the landfill underneath to create electricity.

Carpenter Ridge is still several years from development. It needs legislative approval, an access road needs to be built and the facility itself hasn’t been designed.

The state-owned Dolby Landfill in East Millinocket is limited to serving as a disposal site for the local paper mill. Even if that were changed, a process that would take at least five to seven years, the potential capacity of the landfill would be too small to serve the state for an extended period of time.

Waste Management-owned Crossroads Landfill in Norridgewock, which survived the state’s elimination of private landfills because it already existed, is expected to reach capacity within about 12 years. That landfill also is eyeing an expansion bid.

For now, the state is relying on Juniper Ridge to meet its waste disposal needs, but it can do so only with an expansion — an expansion that awaits DEP approval.

Public benefit

When Casella agreed to operate Juniper Ridge as part of the deal that revived the Old Town mill, it signed a three-decade contract with the state.

“The state picked a 30-year deal,” Meagher said. “The 30-year deal can only work with an expansion.”

The contract specified the need for an expansion in the future, according to Meagher.

“Now we’re fighting over whether that expansion is going to happen or not,” he said.

Meagher said regulation changes and obstacles have made the inevitable expansion of Juniper Ridge more trying and contentious than it should have been.

A year ago, the State Planning Office and Juniper Ridge pulled their application for an expansion after the DEP issued a draft denial because it saw questions that were unanswered in the paperwork.

The only items the DEP considers in making a public benefit determination are:

• Whether the expansion meets immediate, short-term or long-term state landfill capacity needs.

• Whether it’s consistent with the state waste management recycling plan.

• Whether it’s inconsistent with local, regional or state waste collection, storage, transportation or disposal activities.

Opposition to the renewed expansion proposal has been boisterous, with many going beyond the three items.

“I suspect that if a vote were taken, that the overwhelming majority of Maine citizens would not want any out-of-state waste brought into the state,” Orono resident Al Larson wrote in a letter to Cyndi Darling of the DEP. “The people who represent us in Augusta are supposed to do the will of the Maine people, not some corporation whose only purpose is to make a profit for their stockholders.”

Many letters blame Casella for filling its own landfill too quickly with waste shipped in from other states.

In her letter, Deborah Gibbs of Milford argued that the DEP’s public benefit determination shouldn’t fall in favor of Casella before a full audit of all waste going into Juniper Ridge is conducted “to accurately determine which public benefits (be it Massachusetts’s public, Connecticut’s public, New Hampshire’s public … half the country’s public?)”

She also argues that the expansion would be inconsistent with the state’s waste management hierarchy because “[Juniper Ridge’s] waste capacity is prematurely being utilized by imports from out-of-state and going to sorting and processing facilities within the state that do not reduce, reuse or recycle to the greatest extent possible.”

Several trucking and waste-to-energy businesses, as well as the city of Lewiston — home to KTI Bio Fuels — voiced support for the expansion. They argued that the expansion of Juniper Ridge would allow business at Maine’s waste processing facilities to continue maintaining jobs, creating energy, bringing money to the state and handling the waste disposal needs of Maine residents.

The DEP should issue its ruling “fairly close” to the Jan. 31 deadline, according to DEP spokeswoman Samantha DePoy-Warren.

Even after the DEP reaches a decision, Casella, its facilities and the state will continue to face those critical of how waste is handled in Maine.

“As long as we keep making garbage, we’ll have controversy,” Huber said. “No one wants it.”

To view an in-depth, cross-section map of the Juniper Ridge landfill site, click here.