Panel tables bill on demolition debris disposal

AUGUSTA – It was standing room only Thursday as the Legislature’s Natural Resources Committee rehashed statistics regarding Maine’s solid waste.

The committee held a workshop to discuss the proposed LD 141, a bill to ban the disposal in a landfill or in an incineration facility of construction and demolition debris. But after about two hours of discussion, the bill was tabled because its sponsor, state Sen. John Martin, D-Eagle Lake, was absent.

LD 141 was carried over from last session and was created in response to a proposed Massachusetts law that bans all burying and burning of construction and demolition debris in Massachusetts, even if it originates in the state.

“If we don’t have any regulations, we’re potentially going to pick up demo that has lead paint and planking with chemicals on them, and then they’ll be burned or buried in Maine,” Martin said last year in an interview.

Instead of taking action Thursday on the bill, legislators questioned state officials from the Department of Environmental Protection, State Planning Office, and DEP’s Air Quality Bureau and requested more information for the next session about Maine’s biomass boilers, landfills, and other solid waste statistics.

Members of We the People and concerned residents from Athens also attended the meeting, saying they wanted to keep up to speed on the bill.

We the People is a grass-roots group opposed to Juniper Ridge Landfill in Old Town and concerned about Georgia-Pacific Corp. paper mill’s request to burn construction and demolition debris as a substitute fuel in its newly installed biomass boiler.

Residents from Athens also have concern about the biomass boiler that GenPower LLC of Needham, Mass., proposed last fall to construct in their town.

Maine and New York currently are the only states that have biomass plants that are burning construction and demolition debris, according to Paula Clark, director of DEP’s Division of Solid Waste.

Although it hasn’t been banned in all other states, burning debris isn’t a common practice elsewhere.

“How can [Maine residents] get some assurance that this is safe when no other state in New England allows this?” asked. state Rep. Robert Duchesne, D-Hudson.

Although the committee’s chairman, Sen. Scott Cowger, D-Hallowell, tried to keep the focus on construction and demolition debris, he and other members of the committee noted that questions about the state’s waste policy as a whole need to be looked at in order to make strong, effective policy.

Duchesne on Thursday proposed an amendment to LD 141, which would ban the burning of construction and demolition debris in the state, but noted after the workshop that changes will be made to the bill and the proposed amendment before it moves forward.

The bill likely won’t be looked at again until after the Board of Environmental Protection meets next week to discuss and possibly advise the DEP on proposed construction and demolition debris rule changes.