Watching our Waste Line Landfill debate highlights need for trash reduction, recycling, composting

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After reading this newspaper, you’ll probably toss it into the garbage with your Saturday-morning eggshells and coffee grounds. Perhaps you’re among the small percentage of people who recycle their papers, or the even tinier minority who actually compost their eggshells.

But even with Maine’s impressive 37 percent recycling rate, the state will run out of room for its trash by 2011, according to a recent Maine Planning Office analysis.

Passionate local debate over the state’s decision to buy the West Old Town Landfill, then contract its operation to an out-of-state firm, has raised the ghosts of Maine’s last waste management debate – a few rocky years in the late 1980s when out-of-state garbage trucks were imagined to be revving their engines at the York tollbooth, and all of Augusta was obsessed with trash.

But regardless of the outcome in Old Town, the truth now is the same as it was in the 1980s, and since the dawn of civilization when people chucked bones and shells into the underbrush: Humans have always produced trash, but have never liked to live with it.

Seven elephants

According to national averages, an American will produce 52 tons of rubbish in a lifetime – that’s more than seven elephants’ worth of weight in junk mail and apple cores per person. Here in Maine, statistics indicate that we collectively throw away 1.8 million tons per year.

Of that, just over a third is recycled or composted, about a quarter is buried in landfills, and most of the rest is burned in the state’s four incinerators. Today, Maine averages among the top 10 states nationally for its success in recycling, though individual towns’ rates vary widely.

But for decades, waste management in Maine was limited to advice on how to kill rats and when to put out the ever-smoldering fires lighted to reduce the trash piles.

“Historically, we directed the least amount of money and effort that we could get away with,” said George Criner, a professor of waste management at the University of Maine in Orono. “The harbor would be clogged [where some towns discarded their garbage]. You’d have stinking dumps in the poor parts of town.”

In 1968, Maine studied its waste management strategy and found that the state had 356 dumps, almost one for every city and town. Most burned constantly, with 98 percent polluting the air, and at least half polluting water.

Most dumps were located near wetlands or in abandoned gravel pits that were a direct conduit to Maine’s drinking water. Horrible locations were the rule, not the exception, said Paula Clark, who has worked in waste management for decades and now heads that department for the Maine Department of Environmental Protection.

But as people joined a growing environmental movement throughout the 1970s and ’80s, they began to fear the impact that pollution from these dumps could have on wildlife and human health.

“People were really tuned in to the natural world,” said Sherry Huber, who later would head Maine’s Waste Management Agency.

In the 1970s, the new federal air and water quality regulations that grew out of this public awakening forced some of the dirtiest dumps to shut down, yet it took nearly two decades before Maine made a serious attempt to close its dumps and modernize waste management.

Three-ring circus

Maine entered the 1980s, as did the rest of the nation, reeling from the discovery that trash could be dangerous. Most famously, hundreds of upstate New Yorkers who lived near the Love Canal toxic waste dump suffered mysterious cancers and chromosome damage before being evacuated from their homes.

The dramatic incident spurred states to move all rubbish, toxic or not, away from population centers. And as densely populated New England sought alternatives, rural Maine was targeted as a destination for some of the region’s trash.

While trash imports were relatively minimal, people feared escalation and worried that Mainers could run out of room for their own refuse. An “unprecedented” number of applications for new landfills was filed by entrepreneurial developers in 1986, and residents began to worry that Maine would become “a dumping ground,” Clark said.

The state began receiving calls reporting dozens of trash trucks crossing the state line, and, whether there was any truth to the threat, the fear was very real.

“We had what was seen as a landfill crisis,” Huber said.

Worried homeowners filled the editorial pages of local newspapers with fears of Massachusetts and Connecticut trash polluting their water. They packed town meetings and Augusta hearing rooms. One observer described the situation in the state capital as a “three-ring circus.”

“There was a great grass-roots army coming to the State House,” said John Dieffenbacher-Krall, co-director of the Maine People’s Alliance, an activist group that was involved in the solid waste debate.

The argument captivated Augusta for four years, culminating in a 1989 law that laid out 96 pages of state waste management strategy. Most importantly, the law shifted waste management from private to state hands with a ban on new commercial landfills.

“We thought if the state was running them there wouldn’t be this profit motive,” Dieffenbacher-Krall said.

Though the Supreme Court had decided previously that no state could ban trash imports, Maine’s law banning new commercial landfills passed legal muster and set national precedent. Even critics called the legislation “visionary.”

The law also created a state Waste Management Agency to handle the new responsibility, which agency director Huber called “the job that nobody else wanted to think about.”

To burn or to bury

The 1989 law set a hierarchy of priorities for the state: First, we would strive to reduce waste, then reuse discarded products, followed in order by recycling, composting, incinerating and, finally – at No. 6 – burying rubbish in a landfill.

Landfills were the most immediate threat, said Huber. “The landfill was the last thing you wanted in your town. People associated them with all the open-burning dumps – really ugly and visible.”

Also, just after the law was passed, a landfill in Norridgewock literally collapsed, spewing decades-old trash over 18 acres and contaminating local wells. The uncovered trash also illustrated a whole new problem with landfills – the garbage wasn’t breaking down.

“That’s when everybody realized that landfills are like an archaeological dig,” Huber said. “You could read newspapers that were 25 years old. You could pull a steak out of there still in its supermarket wrapping.”

And only 37 percent of Maine’s land, on average, was even suitable for landfills that would not pollute groundwater, according to a 1970 report. With ever-encroaching development, particularly in population-dense southern Maine, today’s figure is likely even lower.

“Maine is not particularly well-suited to landfills,” Criner said. “There aren’t a whole lot of big, flat spaces that aren’t near streams – ultimately, there’s a finite limit.”

So instead, with the mid-1970s oil embargo still fresh in their minds, Mainers began embracing a new technology that promised to burn their waste and convert it to energy. Though groups such as the Maine People’s Alliance mounted some opposition, worried about the impacts on air quality, most residents welcomed the waste-to-energy incinerators.

“We believed that they were far less damaging to the environment and to health. Energy was just an added benefit,” Huber said.

However, the promise of the incinerators was never fully realized. Maine wasn’t sending them enough trash to keep the facilities constantly selling the energy needed to balance their budgets. The plants eventually stabilized their operations by charging higher fees and buying out-of-state trash, but the electric deregulation of 2000 threw them another loop, taking away the preferential pricing that had been given to waste-burning plants.

Incinerators had another shortcoming that received little consideration at first as people celebrated the creation of domestic energy – they still need landfills to survive. About a quarter of the trash that is burned in incinerators is transformed into ash that must be buried in a landfill. In 2001, for instance, 602,290 tons of trash burned in Maine incinerators resulted in 155,195 tons of ash.

Despite the state’s statutory preference to burn instead of bury its trash, no new incinerators have been built in Maine for decades. The four active incinerators are all about the same age and are expected to wear out over the next 20 to 30 years. Whether the multimillion-dollar facilities can be replaced and remain profitable is uncertain, said George MacDonald, waste management and recycling program manager for the State Planning Office.

“Someone changed the game,” he said.

The end of the town dump

The biggest success story of Maine’s 1989 waste management law has been the extinction of the town dump.

A program that encouraged regional consolidation by paying up to 75 percent of closure costs and 95 percent of environmental cleanups has succeeded in closing most of Maine’s traditional dumps. The program relied on $75 million in bond money approved by voters in a parade of ballot measures throughout the 1990s.

At its peak, the DEP program closed 80 landfills in a single year, said Ted Wolfe, who has overseen landfill closures at the department for most of the program’s life. Today, just eight municipal and two commercial landfills serve 493 communities. Only two are unlined landfills, both municipal facilities located in rural areas without any industrial waste. Maine also operates 24 wood and construction debris facilities, so-called “stump dumps” that don’t have to meet the stringent landfill requirements and take more than 50,000 tons of trash out of the waste stream.

All totaled, the state has reduced the number of its landfills and dumps by more than 95 percent.

“Given the size of Maine, it was a phenomenal effort,” Wolfe said.

The dump closures also are seen as a major cause in the concurrent tripling of Maine’s recycling rate to nearly 40 percent – 687,815 tons of waste were recycled in 2001.

With regional landfills charging communities “tipping fees” based on the weight of their waste, recycling suddenly made economic sense.

“[Towns were saying], ‘If we can reduce the volume of waste we have to manage, that saves us money right off the bat,'” MacDonald said.

Residents’ groups embraced the idea, hoping that the dawn of recycling could mean the end of new landfills.

At the Waste Management Agency, Huber served as the state’s chief recycling booster, winning towns over by offering grants.

“If we came bearing money, of course they were interested. People aren’t stupid,” she said.

State law had set Maine’s recycling goal at 50 percent of all waste by 1994, a deadline that later was extended to 2002 and still hasn’t been reached. In recent years, waste production has continued to rise, while recycling has hit a plateau.

Some blame declining interest in recycling on the lack of recent public discourse; others say the drive to recycle disappeared with the mid-1980s landfill threat, or point to economic shifts.

“The elusive 50 percent goal … we just stopped talking about it,” Huber said.

Carpenter Ridge

Meanwhile, the young Waste Management Agency also was fulfilling the third major goal of the 1989 plan – to identify and develop sites for new state-owned landfills.

Legislators had asked Huber’s staff to identify two sites for new special waste landfills, within 50 miles of the large commercial incinerators in Orrington and Biddeford. Despite numerous federal fights on the issue, incinerator ash is not considered hazardous waste. However, the concentrated chemicals and heavy metals that can sometimes be found in the ash have caused Maine to consider it “special waste,” which can be buried only in the most secure landfills, now only in Norridgewock and Hampden. Old Town would be the third.

The search for appropriate sites reignited the debate that had spurred legislators to act in the first place. No town would welcome the new landfills, state-owned or not. Residents’ groups with acronyms such as SPOIL and STOP and CARE sprung up overnight to fight the development of new waste facilities in their towns. Environmentalist Nancy Oden made her name in Maine fighting to protect rural Washington County. And Sharon Treat, the current majority leader of the Maine Senate, represented Alton and Ellsworth in their legal battles to keep landfills out.

A series of public meetings in the 15 or so towns that housed potential sites were no less than disastrous. It seemed that selecting just one landfill location might be impossible.

“The level of trust was so low that people didn’t believe we wanted information,” Huber said. “I know how it sounds, ‘We’re the government, we’re here to help you,’ … but I really was trying to make it work.”

Finally, Huber learned of a site just outside Lincoln that the local paper company had been considering for a private landfill. Known as Carpenter Ridge, the 35-acre site had the right soil, the right topography and was extremely rural.

“We really felt confident that this was the best site in the entire state if you had to put something into the ground,” Huber said. “My theory was: [Carpenter Ridge] is going to be a Cadillac, and nobody else will ever build a Ford again.”

After a year of paperwork, the state’s Land Use Regulation Commission and the DEP approved the site, granting permits in 1995 for construction that would begin as soon as Maine seemed in danger of overflowing its landfill capacity.

But at about the same time, new Gov. Angus King sliced the recession-era state budget and eliminated the Waste Management Agency, splitting its duties between DEP and the State Planning Office.

“Angus said, ‘Declare victory and go home,'” Huber recalled. “But I still felt we had work to do.”

West Old Town

With the agency gone, waste management has been little more than a footnote in the public consciousness over the past nine years. But the state’s decision to pass over Carpenter Ridge in favor of buying the West Old Town Landfill from Georgia-Pacific for $26 million last year brought the subject back to life.

The state argues that this purchase will keep the paper mill solvent, while giving Maine a bargain on a new special waste landfill. The development of Carpenter Ridge as the state’s third special waste landfill could cost $35 million before the facility ever begins accepting trash, while the West Old Town Landfill is already up and running.

Maine’s trash capacity will run out by 2011, and the loss of aging incinerators could spell further capacity problems without a new landfill somewhere in the state. Waste totals are growing every year, despite a steady population, MacDonald said.

Some of that growth comes from the increase in out-of-state trash being shipped to Maine. Unlike in the mid-1980s when the state was gripped with unrealized fears, Maine imported more trash than it exported for the first time in 2001. Imported waste represents about 12 percent of the total tonnage of waste that Maine generates.

Homegrown waste has been on the rise, too, as a result of the economic growth and perpetually shrinking interest rates that followed the boom years of the 1990s, MacDonald said.

“There’s a lot of pressure in the Northeast,” Criner agreed.

The 1989 plan didn’t consider buying a private landfill – that just wasn’t an option when the paper industry was thriving, Huber said.

But neither does anything in the law prohibit the deal to buy the G-P landfill and contract its operation to a private company such as Casella Waste Systems. In fact, the West Old Town landfill isn’t too many miles away from the Alton site that was considered for a state landfill back in the early 1990s.

The state has to do something to ensure that municipalities and the incinerators that serve them have somewhere to dump their waste. And, if the operators of those landfills consider it in their economic best interest to supplement Maine waste with out-of-state supplies, that is their court-ordered right, officials said.

“There will always be landfills as long as there’s waste,” Clark said.

But opponents of the West Old Town project argue that the private landfill, completed in 1996, might not be environmentally sound. The state isn’t making thoughtful decisions based on its waste management plan and it is rushing to react to a situation without considering public well-being, they say.

In fact, the state has lacked leadership on waste management issues since the agency closed down nine years ago, said Dieffenbacher-Krall.

“The state has really been adrift,” he said. “There is no plan, there’s a crisis mentality.”

Despite the public outcry over the Old Town deal’s impacts on property values, ecology and public health, the state has given the deal tentative approval, and most observers expect that with the power of the Blaine House behind it, the West Old Town Landfill can’t be defeated.

But all the sound and fury has had one important impact – it has made rubbish personal for the first time in years.

The only way to solve the solid waste problem, once and for all, is to look to the 1989 priority list and reduce the amount of trash we produce; with increased recycling, with composting and with new products designed to reduce waste, said MacDonald.

Whether this battle alone can reinvigorate the passion that closed hundreds of dumps and created dozens of recycling centers depends on each and every person who tosses their newspaper into a Dumpster, he said.

“Now, all of a sudden, you have a community with its eyes wide open. I’m hoping we can capture that energy,” Dieffenbacher-Krall agreed.

“If we’re going to end up with this Old Town landfill, let’s make this our last landfill,” Dieffenbacher-Krall said.

Editor’s Note: All statistical data are based on 2001 figures, the most recent available, as compiled by the State Planning Office.