An area lobster dealer’s processing facility has strained the limits of Bucksport’s wastewater treatment plant for more than a year, leading the town to require the company to improve its own treatment.
Greenhead Lobster, a Stonington-based dealer that is among Maine’s largest, opened its 15,000-square-foot processing plant in Bucksport’s industrial park in 2019. By 2025, it was handling up to 40,000 pounds a day as market demand shifts toward frozen and processed products, rather than whole live lobster, the Island Ad-Vantages newspaper reported.
The plant is one of the only family-owned processors on the Atlantic coast and supports a sizable number of Stonington’s lobstering families, with an aim to provide some insulation from the volatilities of the lobster industry through local vertical integration.
But doing so has evidently come with issues, as the amount of pollutants in water heading to the municipal plant have violated the town’s sewer ordinance and put more demand on the facility than it was designed to handle, according to the town.
Greenhead didn’t return requests for comment.
The two parties met last year to discuss the facility’s impacts on the town’s treatment plant with few results, Town Manager Jacob Gran wrote in an Aug. 31 letter notifying the company that it would be required to sign a special agreement.
Since then, the town has seen “only slight and sporadic improvements” in the facility’s load of total suspended solids, which are relatively larger particles of material, such as lobster parts, that don’t dissolve in water or settle out.
The letter said there were no improvements in the facility’s biochemical oxygen demand, or the amount of oxygen needed to break down organic matter in the water, which is used as a measure of how much organic matter remains in it.
The special agreement is required by the town’s sewer ordinance, which limits any one user’s amount of suspended solids and biochemical oxygen demand.
On four dates between late September 2025 and mid-August of this year, the average biochemical oxygen demand from Greenhead was an estimated 594 pounds, or almost six times the town’s limit of 300 mg/l. At its highest recorded point last month, it was more than eight times the limit.
On a fifth date, recordings were invalid due to “high strength,” according to data from the town, which acknowledged that testing for both was limited.
On the same dates, the total suspended solids averaged about three times the town limit of 350 mg/l or an estimated 363 pounds, ranging from a high of more than seven times the limit to a low of about double that limit.
The plant is designed for an average loading of 850 pounds per day for total suspended solids and biochemical oxygen demand, according to the letter. Limited current town data showed the processor was using about 70% of the plant’s biochemical oxygen demand capacity and 43% of its total suspended solids space, “which does not leave much room for other sources.”
An agreement will be drafted late this fall and another meeting will be held to review it, according to the town. Greenhead will then have the winter to make treatment upgrades to be in place by spring and summer 2027.
The agreement will require pretreatment standards and weekly sample testing, according to the letter, which says the Maine Department of Environmental Protection also requires the agreement because of negative impacts from the facility’s “excessive” load on the plant.
The plant is one of the only family-owned processing plants on the Atlantic coast, including in New Brunswick and Newfoundland, and buys from about 100 boats in Stonington, owner Hugh Reynolds told the Island Ad-Vantages in the summer of 2025.
“We’re excited to be part of it, and with the processing plant, to be able to bring some stability to the business, to help insulate the community from some of the extraneous, outside factors,” he said.
The plant can also process other seafood in the off-season and is trialing its own aquaculture operation to support that, he previously told the BDN.
