OLD TOWN – A complaint last week of soot from the stacks at the Red Shield Environmental LLC facility in Old Town falling on residences in Bradley couldn’t be confirmed by the Maine Department of Environmental Protection.

“Some residents called in the middle of last week about another sooting incident over in Bradley,” DEP regional manager Ed Logue said Monday. “We did investigate and really couldn’t substantiate it.”

There was an incident last spring where soot from Red Shield’s stacks fell on Bradley, which is across the river from Old Town, but there was no danger, and the mill poses no threat to the public, Logue said.

At this time, Red Shield is continuing to burn green wood chips instead of the mix of green wood and construction and demolition debris wood that the facility is permitted to burn.

The DEP stopped the facility from burning the waste wood after higher than normal amounts of leachable lead were found in ash taken from the boiler.

Burning green wood also has its problems.

“When we burn the green wood and it’s wet at this time of year, we have trouble with our carbon monoxide emissions,” Red Shield Environmental Manager Dick Arnold said Tuesday.

The company isn’t in violation of any state limitations or licenses but is working with DEP to keep its emission levels in compliance.

There also have been some minor problems with the opacity meters on the stacks that measure the density of smoke coming out, but DEP is aware of the issue and Red Shield is working to correct this as well, Arnold said.

“They have to be up and running, according to the law, 95 percent of the time that the boiler’s running, and they weren’t,” Bryce Sproul, director of licensing and compliance with the DEP’s bureau of air quality, said Monday. “That doesn’t mean there was extra smoke. They just had some monitor issues.”

Red Shield is continuing to work with the state, the University of Maine and other interested parties to get its ethanol production line up and running.

Two other companies also are interested in moving into the facility that Red Shield is continuing to work and negotiate with, Arnold said.

One of the companies is a yet-to-be-disclosed European firm that uses a new technology to coat paper that is more environmentally friendly than current methods.

The other is Seldon Technologies Inc. of Vermont, which is a privately held nanotechnology company focused on incorporating the properties of carbon nanotubes into products for today’s markets.

Seldon has developed new filtering technology that removes microorganisms from fluids without the use of heat, ultraviolet light or chemicals.

Red Shield now employs about 200 people, primarily former millworkers. It’s unclear how many people the two additional prospective companies would employ.

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