State’s role looms large in monitoring waste flow

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TAKING IN THE TRASH

On a recent sunny afternoon, George MacDonald was seated inside an office at the base of Juniper Ridge Landfill in Old Town when he recalled a favorite truism about one of modern society’s growing problems.

Trash, MacDonald said, is something that everybody wants picked up, but no one wants put back down.

Enormous bulldozers could be seen crawling the mountain of trash outside, working to spread out several recent truckloads. MacDonald, who heads the State Planning Office’s Waste Management and Recycling Program, motioned toward the state-owned landfill and added: “This is a place nobody wants to see, but we can’t live without it.”

MacDonald is part of a small army of employees in the State Planning Office, Department of Environmental Protection and State Police who deal with the nearly 2.4 million tons of waste generated by Mainers or trucked into the state each year.

But Maine also relies heavily on for-profit waste companies to follow an “honor code” when it comes to trash reporting and monitoring. And that has some observers concerned.

The DEP, which handles most environmental enforcement, has about 10 inspectors to monitor the state’s 12 landfills, four waste-to-energy incineration facilities and roughly 240 locally operated transfer stations. The agency also is in charge of keeping tabs on the many now-closed municipal landfills created long before environmental regulations even existed.

Whereas the old municipal landfills rarely were monitored at all, today’s waste facilities are required to monitor content of gases being produced as waste decomposes, groundwater quality, and the landfill’s physical characteristics, among other things.

“We do have inspectors, but we don’t have them assigned to every facility by any means,” said Paula Clark, director of the Department of Environmental Protection’s Division of Solid Waste Management.

David Littell, commissioner of the Department of Environmental Protection, acknowledged that staffing is “challenging” in today’s budget environment. Staff is stretched thin, he said, but they work hard. And Maine is not unique in this respect.

In addition to regular monitoring, DEP staff will do spot-checking on site when a complaint is filed. Anonymous complaints often come from within the industry.

“They are competitive and they tend to report on one another if they get out of line,” Littell said.

In fact, Maine relies heavily on companies to not only police one another but, in many respects, to accurately monitor themselves.

For example, Casella Waste Systems, which operates Juniper Ridge landfill in Old Town on the state’s behalf, has a license from the DEP that lists what waste is acceptable for disposal in Juniper Ridge. Those restrictions were laid out in a 2003 agreement that the company negotiated with the state to help save jobs at the former Georgia-Pacific Corp. mill in town.

Casella is restricted to accepting only in-state waste, although critics contend a loophole in state law allows the facility to ship non-Maine waste to Juniper Ridge.

The company submits reports to the DEP on a monthly basis identifying every truck, the hauling company, the type and amount of waste the truck was carrying and where, exactly, it came from. The company also monitors the landfill runoff, known as “leachate,” for the presence of hazardous chemicals that could signal that unacceptable waste made its way into the facility.

Don Meagher, manager of planning and development for Casella, which also owns Pine Tree Landfill in Hampden, said all of these monitoring and reporting requirements lead to the company “operating in a fishbowl.”

Yet Casella does not sample every truckload of trash that enters its facility.

Instead, Casella relies on the company generating the waste to follow the proper procedures to ensure that waste not supposed to go in Juniper Ridge isn’t inside the trailer bed.

“There is no question it is essentially an honor system that we are dealing with,” Meagher said. “The reality is, if the generator is falsifying their statements, they are liable to have the materials removed [from the landfill] at enormous expense.”

Clark said the type and frequency of monitoring depends on the facility. At Juniper Ridge, which has nearly 10 million cubic yards of capacity, DEP staff have been on site weekly or better conducting various tests, inspections and consultations, Clark said.

While DEP staff are not there to inspect every load that arrives, Clark said that in her several decades of experience, there have been few problems with companies violating the terms of their contracts.

“It is not in their best interest to lie about the reporting requirements,” Clark said. “My experience is they are interested in operating their businesses in an honest fashion, and that’s what they do.”

Others are convinced, however, that Casella and other waste companies are more interested in profits than Maine’s long-term environmental health.

During meetings last year of a blue ribbon commission charged with reviewing trash policies, critics repeatedly suggested that waste companies were exploiting a perceived loophole in state policy on non-Maine trash.

At the center of this suspicion is the recent influx of construction and demolition debris, or CDD, from Maine’s New England neighbors.

In 2005, more than 571,800 tons of CDD was disposed in Maine’s three largest landfills: – Pine Tree in Hampden, Crossroads landfill in Norridgewock and Juniper Ridge.

Of that total, at least 41 percent – or roughly 235,000 tons – was trucked into Maine from out of state. Because of Maine’s policy barring disposal of out-of-state waste in public landfills, the vast majority of the CDD ended up in Hampden or Norridgewock, which are privately owned.

The problem, according to critics, is a Maine policy that allows out-of-state CDD to become in-state waste when it is sorted or processed in Maine.

Three facilities – Red Shield Environmental at the former G-P mill in Old Town and two Boralex plants in Stratton and Livermore – currently burn CDD in biomass boilers for energy or steam, although another four hold CDD licenses.

Because Maine does not generate enough CDD to meet the plants’ fuel demands, hundreds of thousands of tons of wood waste is imported into the state annually.

Anywhere from 60 percent to 80 percent of an unsorted pile of raw CDD is unsuitable for burning in biomass boilers under Maine’s stringent fuel quality standards. The unsuitable wood waste, known as “residue” or “bypass” in industry lingo, ends up in a landfill.

The vast majority of imported CDD comes into Maine pre-processed, meaning little to no residue wood waste ends up in state landfills, according to the DEP. But out-of-state CDD that is sorted at a Maine processing facility becomes in-state waste after processing, which then can legally be dumped in a state landfill.

Critics contend that sets up a situation where untold thousands of tons of out-of-state CDD residue will not only be landfilled inside Maine, it could legally end up in Juniper Ridge.

One scenario heard often during meetings on CDD is that an unscrupulous processor could remove a single piece of burnable wood from a tractor-trailer load and send the rest to Juniper Ridge as in-state trash.

Representatives of the DEP and Casella, which manages Juniper Ridge and supplies CDD to Red Shield Environmental, say that’s not happening.

“The story is being told, and I think it’s a hypothetical construct, like ‘What if this happened?'” said the DEP’s Clark. “But I’ve never seen it happen.”

Casella’s Meagher said the company’s current processing facility, KTI Biofuels in Lewiston, is relatively small. The company is seeking authorization for a larger CDD processing plant in Westport. But Meagher described the “2-by-4” scenario as an “easy-enough sound bite” used by landfill and CDD opponents.

“There are clearly people who are concerned that there is waste coming into this landfill from out of state. They do not have a shred of evidence,” Meagher said.

Whether or not it’s actually happening now, many people are convinced Juniper Ridge could become a dumping ground for out-of-state CDD, especially after the planned closure of Pine Tree Landfill in 2009.

Tom Sawyer, the former owner of what is now Pine Tree Landfill and a member of the state’s Blue Ribbon Task Force on Solid Waste Management, said the state’s current policy on the processing of out-of-state waste goes against Maine’s efforts to prolong the life of its landfills.

Construction projects last summer in Maine made it necessary to bump up the timeline for opening a new portion of Juniper Ridge last fall. That action made some observers nervous about its future.

Sawyer, a former lawmaker, said that as a state-owned resource with finite capacity, Juniper Ridge landfill should be managed for the long term. For that reason, Sawyer believes the state should rethink its policies on processing non-Maine waste as well as renegotiate its contract with Casella to avoid filling Juniper Ridge with CDD.

Sawyer is also adamant about the need for a full-time state employee based at Juniper Ridge.

“If I owned that landfill, you can bet your booty I’d have one of my employees there,” Sawyer said. “Since the state owns it, I think it would be prudent to have the state sitting at the scale house, looking at the record and having the authority to inspect loads.”

Littell countered that if he received authorization for an additional staff person, he wouldn’t locate the person at Juniper Ridge. As for the controversy over out-of-state CDD, Littell said that policy decision predates his term as commissioner. But he believes the department’s policies must be consistent from year to year.

“The Legislature clearly can change it, and if there really is an issue, we will look at changing it,” Littell said. “But you certainly don’t want every new commissioner coming in and saying, ‘I don’t like this or I don’t like that.'”

MacDonald with the State Planning Office pointed out that if Casella violated the terms of its contract with the state, Maine officials could revoke the company’s license to operate Juniper Ridge.

Added Meagher: “We have much more to lose than to gain. We have probably $40 [million] to $50 million invested in this facility.”

“The contract is what it is,” Littell said. “All I can do is do our job and show that we are enforcing the laws when they are broken.”

On that point, Littell pointed to the recent discovery of emissions problems and high lead levels in soot from Red Shield as proof that the department’s monitoring system is effective. The department caught the problems early – long before they would threaten public health – and is forcing the company to fix the issues.

Without going into details, Littell said the problems at Red Shield were “serious problems” that would result in “substantial enforcement action.”

“It’s quite clear to me that the system is working,” he said.

As a result of the Red Shield incident, the department is looking at revising its monitoring and testing of fuel coming into the plant as well as outgoing ash headed to the landfill. Staff may decide that more frequent testing is merited or identify other changes to state rules.

“We’re always looking at our rules and always revising them,” Littell said.

BANGOR DAILY NEWS PHOTO BY BRIDGET BROWN

A waste truck is weighed on its way in (left) as another waits to be weighed on its way out at Juniper Ridge Landfill in Old Town last month.

BANGOR DAILY NEWS PHOTO BY JOHN CLARKE RUSS

Red Shield burns construction and demolition debris as well as wood chips in several of their boilers in Old Town. This view from March is through an opening in one of its boilers.