BREWER, Maine — For years, sludge created in the city has been sent to a Plymouth fertilizer processing plant that uses septic waste and sludge to make its products, but that all changes next month, when it will be sent to Hartland.
Soil Preparation Inc., which opened two decades ago in Plymouth and is licensed to accept septic waste and sludge for processing into organic, nonfood crop fertilizers, started diverting all of the material on June 1 to Casella Organics and did not submit a bid to continue to provide services to Brewer, finance director Karen Fussell said Friday.
Since June, “all of our sludge has been going to Unity by Casella,” she said of Casella Organics, which has operated a composting facility in Unity called Hawk Ridge for 25 years. “We weren’t surprised” that Soil Preparation did not submit a proposal, Fussell said.
City council members voted unanimously on Monday to sign a $963,000, five-year contract with Malcolm McGraw of WFT Environmental in Levant, which will transport and pay for disposal of the sludge at a secure sludge landfill in Hartland for $192,600 per year.
In October 1986, Hartland received a DEP license to operate a secure sludge landfill, located about a mile north of the town center, and in 1995 added a new phase that includes a double-layer, geosynthetic liner system; leachate-collection and leak-detection systems; and a massive piping system to move the leachate from the landfill to the municipal treatment plant.
Ted Johnston, an environmental consultant who works for Soil Preparation Inc., said in June that stringent new odor nuisance rules led the company to stop accepting waste and divert current customer waste to Casella. The new rules last year resulted in the company paying thousands of dollars in fines.
“You can’t run a business that way,” Johnston said Friday.
The company, which employs about 20 to 25 people, has spent the last couple of months selling the remainder of its onsite product and talking with investors about adding a biosolids gasification line.
Soil Prep received a DEP permit in 2014 to install the gasification line, which is designed to reduce odors in a closed-looped process that would “virtually eliminate odors,” Johnston said, but a bankruptcy with the producer has delayed the installation and the company is still working to secure financing for the $15 million investment.
“They are working diligently on their goal, and it’s just taking a lot longer than we hoped,” Johnston said.