The year 2018 is approaching, and the management of the Municipal Review Committee’s waste is up for negotiation. MRC’s goal was to find the most affordable, efficient and environmentally sound option for its members’ municipal solid waste disposal, and they settled on Fiberight, LLC, which does none of those things.
Maine needs more than technological innovation to sustainably manage solid waste now and into the future. What we need is a well-designed materials management plan for the MRC members, which helps each town cut disposal costs through waste reduction, develops new programs to separately manage organic waste, and provides incentives to reduce, reuse and recycle.
Fiberight’s CEO, Craig Stuart-Paul, has promised a modern, cutting-edge technology, superior to the waste-to-energy incineration process used at PERC. However, Fiberight’s technology is not a solution for MRC’s discarded materials. For starters, there is still a guaranteed annual tonnage needed to keep Fiberight running, not for individual towns but for MRC as a whole, and there is no long-term plan to help towns increase source-separated organics and recycling and ultimately reduce waste.
MRC and Stuart-Paul have given up their first two proposed methods and settled for the amended Mechanical Biological Treatment, or MBT, process, which creates biogas through anaerobic digestion. The additional technology Fiberight is proposing is unproven: No facility anywhere in the world uses the enzymatic hydrolysis process on a commercial scale to convert waste into energy. Some 330 MBT plants exist throughout Europe, but they are costly to run and have not helped their communities reach EU recycling goals, according to the European Court of Auditors. The energy produced does not create any large revenue streams such as the ones Fiberight has proposed.
MRC’s one example of one of these MBTs in Europe is Viridor’s Greater Manchester MBTs. Viridor has a much more holistic approach: diversion for compost, recycling, with education and in the end one MBT plant only produces energy for 2,000 homes using 164,250 tons of MSW annually. PERC produces energy for around 22,000 homes using 300,000 tons of MSW annually, making it more than five times more efficient than the MBT.
Mixed waste processing, as proposed by Fiberight, isn’t a sustainable waste-management solution: The value of recyclable material declines considerably if mixed with organic materials because of contamination. Recyclables have the highest value when presorted and can have little or no market value if mixed with organic and other nonrecyclable waste. Not only are towns discouraged from composting, they also would lose their incentive to source-separate when Fiberight offers the simpler logistics of taking everything unsorted.
Fiberight’s method makes it too easy for MRC towns to mix in their valuable organic materials with harmful waste and recyclables. This is discouraged across Europe and by most experts. It inhibits further aerobic compost and anaerobic digestion options and creates mixed-material waste that is hard to adequately manage in incinerators, landfills or mechanical biological treatment plants.
At a time when Maine and New England solid waste policies are headed toward the separation of organics from the waste stream, Fiberight is headed in the opposite direction. We Compost It, Garbage to Garden and Exeter Agri-Energy are growing exponentially in diverting organic material from becoming waste in Maine and producing a product suitable for gardens and farms. Fiberight, on the other hand, will produce a residue not suitable or legal to use to spread on fields, as organic matter and nonorganic material will be processed together in their facility. To process organic materials with other trash and then turn it into energy is not recycling — it is a waste of energy and resources.
We would have more interest in supporting the Fiberight plan if it included aggressive upfront source reduction and separation. We all know that the most cost-effective way to manage waste is to reduce it. It is time to establish policies and practices in Maine that encourage us to consciously take steps to reduce waste, as our neighboring states of Vermont, Massachusetts and Connecticut are doing, not years down the road when we have wasted time and resources on unproven, unsustainable waste management technologies such as Fiberight.
Lisa Bjerke, a native of Sweden, lives in Bar Harbor. She is a master’s degree student at College of the Atlantic, where she manages the college’s discarded resources. Erickson Smith lives and works in Bar Harbor and serves on the Bar Harbor Conservation Commission. Bill Lippincott lives in Hampden and has been active in solid waste issues over the last 18 years.