HARTLAND, Maine — Debbie Cooper left this town five years ago, but she still keeps the green T-shirt that serves as a relic of her failed campaign to stop a landfill expansion.
“Close it today to protect our tomorrow,” it reads.
Cooper’s grassroots protests and an unsuccessful legal action against Maine regulators drew hostility in this rural community of 1,600 about an hour north of Augusta. Townspeople called her names when she handed out leaflets about the landfill’s odors. Some drivers flipped her off.
The ill will continued even after residents voted in 2021 to spend $3.5 million to expand the town-owned landfill, and it eventually drove Cooper to Carmel. Now her son’s family is leaving the home four generations of Coopers have occupied, citing the same odors and tensions that pushed his mother out.
“I was tired of the town, and the people in the town were treating me pretty rotten,” Cooper said.
The Coopers’ story shows how the regional problem of deciding where to put growing mounds of waste from industry and construction can carry serious consequences for families. In Hartland’s case, it polarized residents. Similar fights are playing out elsewhere as large landfills, including the state-owned Juniper Ridge, near peak capacity and locals push back just as Maine is running out of places to put waste.
At just 8.8 acres, Hartland’s landfill is a fraction of the size of that landfill and many others. But it has an outsized role in Maine’s trash picture, taking in 11% of all solid waste processed in the state last year, said Dalton Plante, the town’s public works director. He manages both the landfill and Hartland’s wastewater treatment plant.
Hartland’s landfill sits near the center of town, and the town faced a tough choice when the tannery that once anchored its economy closed in 2020. The landfill, which originally processed tannery refuse, now takes in sludge and construction debris from other towns. Fees from the landfill users represent the town’s largest single revenue stream and will eventually fund the site’s closure.
The 2021 vote came down to two options: shutting the landfill, which the town had no savings to do and which could have required a steep tax hike, or raising funds to keep it open until the landfill’s own fees could cover an eventual shutdown.
“I don’t like the landfill being in our town, but I know we need it for revenue in the absence of other major businesses like the former tannery,” said Kevin Greenwood, a lifelong Hartland resident who owns a small dairy farm a few miles out of the town center and voted to expand the landfill.
For those who oppose it, the smell is a daily reality. Residents near the landfill said they don’t open their windows or host cookouts anymore.
Longtime resident Rick Sanborn said he recently rebuilt his deck but made it small. He never sits on it because of the smell. He plans to leave town within a couple of years. Rod Pease, who lived across the street from the landfill, has already moved to Burnham.
“I took all of my 401(k) money and built a home to get away from this mess,” said Pease, who was a member of the small protest group with Cooper. “I wanted to get out. I had enough of that town.”
The landfill is unmarked but easily viewed from the main road. On a sunny day in late August, a reporter saw dust clouds from the plows and front loaders pushing waste and debris around the 5.3-acre extension, the fourth and last cell permitted at the site. An acrid odor permeated the air in both directions within a quarter-mile of the site.
Modest homes with tidy yards line Martin Street, the closest residential road. Some sit only a few hundred yards from the landfill. A person in their yard said they didn’t spend much time outside, and the smell sometimes permeates windows and doors, but they cannot afford to move. They did not want to be named, citing the bad feelings over the landfill.
The odors weren’t always this strong, Cooper and others in the area said. They worsened in 2016 after the landfill began accepting municipal sludge and construction debris in addition to tannery waste, which residents said kicked up irritating dust.
Plante said tannery waste was treated with lime to kill odor-causing bacteria, a step waste taken in from other towns might not get. Dust from shredding construction debris is typically controlled by watering it down or halting shredders in high winds. The town has added scrubber pods to remove hydrogen sulfide, the gas behind the rotten-egg smell.
Unprocessed construction debris at the Hartland landfill. Credit: Courtesy of Town of Hartland 
A gas filtration pod at the Hartland landfill scrubs smelly gasses from reaching the air. Credit: Courtesy of Town of Hartland 
Demolition debris is shredded to 4-inch pieces to help stabilize sludge at the Hartland landfill. Credit: Courtesy of Town of Hartland
Hartland is one of three major “special waste” landfills in Maine that take municipal wastewater sludge, construction debris, asbestos-containing material and contaminated soil. Even with expansions underway or planned, all three will run out of room within about 15 years. Hartland expects to hit capacity in five years, Juniper Ridge in Old Town and Alton within 11 if its expansion proceeds, and Crossroads in Norridgewock within 15 following a recent expansion.
The volume of municipal solid waste sent to landfills has risen sharply in recent years, partly because Maine banned spreading wastewater sludge on land in 2022 over its PFAS content, diverting it to landfills instead.
“That put the squeeze on landfills to handle [sludge], regardless of PFAS concentrations,” Plante said. “Landfills were demonized like we were the ones dumping PFAS into the water.”
Hartland’s landfill also had the highest PFAS concentration among 25 landfills tested in a recent Maine Department of Environmental Protection report at 27,970 parts per trillion for all PFAS samples, triple the level found at Juniper Ridge, the state’s largest landfill.
The debate has fractured long-time friendships well beyond those who live close enough to smell it.
The tension is partly rooted in a “persistent misunderstanding” over who owns and runs the landfill, Town Manager Christopher Littlefield said. Hartland has owned and operated it since the mid-1970s. But it was so closely associated with the tannery that some residents believe it’s privately run.
“When people assume a private entity created the problem or should bear the costs, it becomes harder to accept the financial and regulatory obligations that fall on the town itself,” he said.
The town expects to spend $9 million to shut down and continue maintaining the closed landfill. Keeping it open longer extends the revenue stream that will help cover that cost, Littlefield said. The vote in 2021 to expand into a new, fourth cell passed 190-114, with a similar margin authorizing $3.5 million in borrowing for the expansion.
“Those votes reflected a clear understanding among residents that continuing operations was the most responsible way to manage the inevitable financial reality the town faces,” he said. “I don’t sugarcoat difficult information, especially when it involves financial realities or regulatory obligations.”
Still, the Coopers and others blame Littlefield and the selectboard for the lingering acrimony. Debbie’s son, Chad Cooper, said townspeople were scared when they heard their taxes could double if they didn’t vote for the expansion.
“I’ve known Chris my whole life and I have a level of respect for him, but I don’t think he’s handling this properly,” said Chad Cooper, who plans to move his family out of town within months.
He said his wife, Shanann, gets migraines from the odors, and yellow dust from the shredders and truck traffic coats his car most mornings. They live diagonally across the street from the landfill’s entrance. She has sent Littlefield emails to the town complaining about it for years, including one last August that the Bangor Daily News obtained in a public records request.
“This is the responsibility of the town and DEP to own and make right,” Shanann Cooper wrote.
Littlefield said he forwarded her concerns to the Maine DEP to ensure they were answered through the proper regulatory channel. The DEP responded to Shannon Cooper’s odor complaint in May 2026, saying the department’s monitor north of the landfill showed odors that did not exceed health-based benchmarks, spokesperson David Madore said. The DEP last inspected the landfill in July and found it in full compliance, Madore said.
Ongoing bad blood between supporters and opponents of the landfill is another reason the Coopers are leaving. Chad Cooper wasn’t public about his own views on the landfill, he said. But some people considered his mother a “whackadoodle” for protesting, and the reputation followed him.
“I would get ridiculed everywhere I went by people in this town,” he said.
Plante sympathizes with residents bothered by the odors, but said landfills are a necessity.
“If we don’t permit new landfills in the state of Maine in 20 years, we’re going to have to truck waste as far as Ohio,” he said. “We’ll be perpetuating the same crime that has been committed against us if we run out of capacity.”
Lori Valigra reports on the environment for the BDN’s Maine Focus investigative team. Email her at lvaligra@bangordailynews.com. Support for this reporting is provided by the Unity Foundation, a fund at the Maine Community Foundation and donations by BDN readers.