The Bangor City Council is expected to choose Monday night where the city will send its trash starting in 2018.
After attending two recent Bangor City Council workshops on the PERC and Fiberight proposals and reading Craig Stuart-Paul’s recent BDN OpEd giving “330” reasons to choose Fiberight for the region’s waste disposal needs, I feel compelled to weigh in with two solid reasons not to choose Fiberight and one fundamental question.
First, despite Stuart-Paul’s assertion that there are 300-plus mechanical/biological treatment plants in Europe, there is absolutely no facility in North America that does what he is proposing for Maine. While certain aspects of the Fiberight facility may be similar to those in Europe, no one in this country has ever combined all the various technologies and processes that are slated to go into the Fiberight plant here and had it work.
Stuart-Paul may have a small-scale demonstration project in Virginia, but his often-touted commercial-scale facility in Iowa has never gotten off the ground after six years of empty promises and missed deadlines. Even though that’s halfway across the country, you can clearly see the red flags from here in Maine.
But the even more compelling reason not to build Fiberight is that a key component of the proposed Hampden facility, an anaerobic digester (AD) for processing organic waste, already exists just a few miles up the road in Exeter.
Exeter Agri-Energy operates a world-class AD facility on a fifth-generation dairy farm right in the middle of the territory served by PERC. We have a fully funded facility, using proven technology that is found throughout the world, and we have been operating successfully in Exeter for five years without any problems.
We not only process waste from 2,000 cows every day, we are an effective solution for food waste throughout Maine, working with some of the area’s most reputable businesses and institutions, such as Colby and Bates colleges, Whole Foods, MaineGeneral Medical Center, The Jackson Laboratory, and 40 Hannaford supermarkets around the state, including those in the Bangor area. We also are about to start pilot programs with Waterville and Greenville.
State and federal officials, as well as environmentally conscious consumers and businesses, have come to realize that dumping organic waste into incinerators and landfills is a major expense and waste of a valuable resource. We are the solution. The organic waste we process is used to generate heat and electricity, organic fertilizer, soil additives, and bedding for animals.
We still have additional capacity in Exeter. We tried to interest the MRC in our facility a few years ago, but they never followed up and then told the Bangor City Council the other night that we were too expensive.
We are, in fact, a significantly cheaper option for the up to 40 percent of Bangor’s overall municipal waste that is organic waste, and our trucks are already in the city twice a week. Our tip fee for Bangor would be in the $40 per ton range (compared with $70) and transportation costs would be minimal since we are only 25 miles away and already have partners within the city, including Hannaford, the Maine Air National Guard and others.
It is also interesting to note that the Fiberight application with the Maine DEP states that the Hampden plant will discharge 150,000 gallons a day — or more than 50 million gallons a year — all into Bangor’s treatment plant, which would undoubtedly be a strain.
Our effluent, on the other hand, is used as a beneficial fertilizer for croplands on the farm.
It is to PERC’s credit that they see us as a partner, not a competitor. They know that waste separated at the source is better for all of us — better fuel for their plant, higher-value recyclables to sell, and higher-quality organic waste for processing by us. Fiberight says, just throw it all in the same container and we’ll take care of it. It sounds easy, but we know from experience that it just doesn’t work that work way.
But in the end it all comes down to this one fundamental question: Why would Bangor or any other MRC community spend millions of their taxpayers’ dollars to build a facility that seems unlikely to live up to its promises or the state’s solid waste management hierarchy when there already exists a world-class, fully funded, and more environmentally responsible solution right in their own back yard?
Dan Bell is general manager of Exeter Agri-Energy, a renewable energy company that converts animal and food waste into electricity at Stonyvale Farm in Exeter.