HERMON, Maine — The majority owner of the Penobscot Energy Recovery Company rolled out a new venture on Thursday that it says will meet the long-term trash disposal needs of the Maine cities and towns it currently serves.

Maine Waste Processing LLC essentially is a partnership among PERC, a plant in Orrington that burns trash to make electricity; Casella Waste Systems, which currently handles what waste is left over after incineration at Juniper Ridge Landfill; Exeter Agri-Energy, a renewable energy company that converts animal and food waste into electricity and will take on organic waste; and WasteZero, which will handle recyclable materials. Representatives of the companies announced the venture Thursday night as they made their first public pitch to the Hermon Town Council.

“We’ve got this team that we’ve put together. That’s where the expertise comes from. It didn’t happen overnight. This team came together over the better part of a year,” Robert Knudsen, vice president of operations for PERC majority owner USA Energy, said during the group’s presentation.

“By doing this, we expect we can hit all parts of the [Maine Solid Waste Management] hierarchy,” he later said. The hierarchy ranks the preferred methods for trash diversion based on environmental impact and function as a resource.

The new venture is being rolled out as the Municipal Review Committee, a nonprofit group that represents the trash disposal interests of 187 Maine cities and towns, works to woo its members to sign contracts with Fiberight, the Maryland-based company that is gearing up to build a solid waste processing plant that would turn trash into biofuel.

If the necessary approvals and financing come through — and if it can receive assurances that it will be able to process at least 150,000 tons of municipal solid waste a year — Fiberight will construct a 90,000-square-foot plant in Hampden that would meet the needs of MRC members, according to the organization.

The reason the contracts are surfacing now is because a lucrative 30-year power purchase agreement between PERC and what is now Emera Maine expires in early 2018, which gives the operators of the facilities less than three years to line up suppliers of trash and customers for their energy products. Emera has said it will not continue to purchase electricity from PERC once the contract ends because it is too expensive.

The MRC doesn’t believe PERC can remain solvent after the Emera contract expires without significantly raising the costs to the towns, which is why it is planning to operate its own biofuel plant as early as 2017. MRC also balked at initial projections that PERC’s tipping fees could hit the $110 per ton mark after its current power deal ends.

MRC member municipalities are being asked for local approvals by next spring.

As it stands, Fiberight is offering to process MRC members’ trash at a cost of $70 per ton, while PERC’s latest tipping fee price is $84.36 a ton for a 15-year agreement or $89.57 for a 10-year contract.

In addition to its standard option, the new partnership is offering a new pay-as-you-throw option for nonrecyclable waste in cooperation with WasteZero, through which cities and towns could offset disposal costs through the sale of bags, according to a Dec. 14 memo that PERC sent to its municipal customers.

The new contracts no longer require that municipalities provide guaranteed annual tonnage, Knudsen said. While the PERC venture is not dependent on MRC’s trash, it is in the process of trying to retain its current municipal customers.

MRC board members said in February that before striking out in search of new trash-handling technology, they tried to work with PERC’s private partners, namely majority owner USA Energy and minority private owner PERC Holdings LLC.

USA Energy controls about 52.7 percent of the PERC plant, PERC Holdings owns 24.3 percent, and the other 23 percent is controlled by the original member towns and cities that became part of the Municipal Review Committee Inc. before 1998.