BATH – For many cities and towns in Maine, it’s a particularly unpleasant problem: where to put all the sludge.

A foul-smelling human waste byproduct of wastewater plants, sludge has long been used by farmers as a cheap, effective fertilizer. But odor complaints and stricter regulations have forced many of them to find alternatives.

That’s creating problems for Maine cities and towns that need places to dump their sludge.

Bath is the latest of many communities to confront the issue.

With state sludge application

permits off by 13 percent over

the last two years, Bath has been forced to seek new places to put its sludge.

City officials recently hired Lisbon Falls-based Little River Compost to handle Bath’s sludge disposal for the next three years. Composting will cost the city more than three times as much as selling sludge to farmers.

As more suburban homes have been built near farms, complaints about the odor from sludge have mounted.

“The human body knows when something is not good for you,” said Charlene Brogan of Falmouth, who in the late 1990s led a successful effort to prevent the town from spreading its sludge on a farm in her neighborhood.

“Sludge must be bad. It smells so bad, it can make you nauseous,” she said.

The Maine Department of Environmental Protection maintains that sludge is not hazardous when it is handled properly.

David Wright, who supervises the department’s land application program, said that 230 land application sites, most of them farms, were licensed two years ago. Now only 200 sites are licensed, and the number is expected to drop even lower.

“Most of the problems are related to odors,” Wright said. “As more and more people move into rural areas, they’re becoming less tolerant of the odors this can cause.”

Wright said that sludge storage regulations, designed to protect groundwater supplies, also have grown tougher.

As a result, cities and towns in Maine are being forced to find alternative places to put their sludge, even if they are more expensive.

Falmouth now trucks its sludge to a compost facility in Unity.