Maine Towns Vote Whether to Burn Trash or Make Biogas

In one cor­ner is the Munic­i­pal Review Com­mit­tee, a munic­i­pal coop­er­a­tive serv­ing PERC’s 187 user com­mu­ni­ties and gov­erned by rep­re­sen­ta­tives of its mem­ber towns. After deter­min­ing that PERC was too expen­sive to con­tin­ue run­ning, the MRC devel­oped a pro­pos­al with Mary­land-based fiber-to-fuel com­pa­ny Fiberight and waste-to-ener­gy giant Cov­an­ta to build a $67 mil­lion waste-to-bio­gas pro­cess­ing plant in Ham­p­den. Fiberight claims it will be able to con­vert 100 per­cent of the organ­ic mate­r­i­al in the waste stream into com­pressed nat­ur­al gas by using an anaer­o­bic diges­tion process. In order to secure financ­ing for the project, it needs a com­mit­ment from at least 80 per­cent of PERC’s user municipalities.

In the oth­er cor­ner is Eco­maine, a munic­i­pal­ly owned non­prof­it that oper­ates a waste-to-elec­tric­i­ty trash incin­er­a­tor in Port­land. MRC would charge a $65-per-ton dis­pos­al fee and  Eco­maine would charge $70.50 per ton. But unlike Eco­maine, MRC offers its com­mu­ni­ties own­er­ship ben­e­fits that would give mem­ber towns ener­gy rebates from the bio­gas it would sell in future years. With Eco­maine, mid­coast towns would only be con­tract­ed customers.

The big ques­tion for many town lead­ers is whether MRC’s Fiberight plan is a prac­ti­cal, envi­ron­men­tal sound solu­tion for waste man­age­ment or “hocus pocus,” as one Cam­den select­man recent­ly described it. Last week, the board of Mid-Coast Sol­id Waste Cor­po­ra­tion (MCSWC) — which cov­ers Cam­den, Rock­port, Lin­col­nville and Hope — and the waste board serv­ing Thomas­ton, South Thomas­ton and Owls Head vot­ed to rec­om­mend that their mem­ber towns go with the Eco­maine option. At a Mon­day night meet­ing of MCSWC town offi­cials, Cam­den Town Man­ag­er Patri­cia Finnegan argued that Eco­maine has a proven track record, but there is too much uncer­tain­ty about the pro­posed Fiberight facil­i­ty because it would be the first com­mer­cial-scale plant of its kind built in the Unit­ed States.

“We do not doubt the good inten­tions of the MRC board, the tech­ni­cal exper­tise of the part­ners or the sci­ence of the Fiberight plan itself,” said Finnegan. “How­ev­er, we feel we have a respon­si­bil­i­ty to the peo­ple of our com­mu­ni­ties to rec­om­mend the best option that meets sound fis­cal and envi­ron­men­tal stan­dards, and Fiberight does not meet those needs at this time.”

But Fiberight sup­port­ers point out that the plan was devel­oped by a team of sol­id waste experts and pub­lic offi­cials from the towns the MRC serves, includ­ing MCSWC Direc­tor Jim Guer­ra. They argue that Fiberight’s demon­stra­tion facil­i­ty in Vir­ginia was reviewed by a team of researchers from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Maine’s For­est Bio­prod­ucts Research Insti­tute, who deter­mined that the company’s pro­cess­ing tech­nol­o­gy is “sound” and sim­i­lar to exist­ing equip­ment and pro­cess­ing steps found in the pulp-and-paper industry.

“Yes, our form here says it’s not proven in the Unit­ed States, but the same tech­nol­o­gy is in use all over Europe at vary­ing scales,” said MCSWC board mem­ber Bill Chap­man, who is also a Rock­port select­man. “So to say that this is not total­ly proven tech­nol­o­gy is false.”

And, added Chap­man, if mid­coast towns decide to pull out of the MRC coop­er­a­tive to con­tract with Eco­maine, they will miss out on the kind of ener­gy rebates that have kept trash dis­pos­al costs low for the past 25 years.

“We’re leav­ing a lot of mon­ey on the table,” he said.

But the fight isn’t over for the MRC, as res­i­dents will have the final say on what they feel is the most cost-effec­tive and envi­ron­men­tal­ly sus­tain­able solu­tion to man­age their waste at their town meet­ings or at the bal­lot box in June. In the end, their votes could have far-reach­ing eco­nom­ic and envi­ron­men­tal con­se­quences for the region.

Recy­cling & Recov­ery Questions

Both Eco­maine and the MRC/Fiberight plan include sin­gle-sort recy­cling com­po­nents, which mechan­i­cal­ly sort recy­clables from one recy­cling bin rather than requir­ing peo­ple to self-sort at the trans­fer sta­tion. Under the cur­rent self-sort sys­tem, the recy­cling rates for MCSWC towns and Rock­land are under 30 per­cent. Eco­maine says it will be able to increase recy­cling rates by 13 to 15 per­cent due to its sin­gle-sort process and recy­cling edu­ca­tion pro­grams. The MRC claims that its own facil­i­ty could match or exceed Ecomaine’s esti­mate not only because of its sin­gle-sort option but also because its facil­i­ty would remove addi­tion­al recy­clables mixed in with house­hold waste. Both plans would allow towns to opt out of sin­gle-sort and con­tin­ue sell­ing recy­clables on their own.

There is a vig­or­ous debate about which option will most improve recy­cling rates. Art Duri­ty, chair of Mid-Coast Sol­id Waste Cor­po­ra­tion, point­ed out that the con­tract between Fiberight and MRC would require the munic­i­pal coop­er­a­tive to pro­vide the facil­i­ty with a guar­an­teed 150,000 tons of waste per year, which could dis­cour­age towns from recycling.

“The choice was between the Fiberight plan that would allow us to keep doing what we’re doing, pro­duc­ing the same amount of trash and recy­cling at the same lev­el,” said Duri­ty. “or Eco­maine which gave us the flex­i­bil­i­ty to try to reduce waste and increase recycling.”

MRC Board Chair­man Chip Reeves, who is also Bar Harbor’s direc­tor of pub­lic works, acknowl­edged that the Fiber­right plan needs a cer­tain amount of ton­nage to be viable, but said the con­tract allows MRC towns to use a por­tion of its $25 mil­lion reserve fund to keep the plant run­ning if it doesn’t receive enough waste.

For some Eco­maine sup­port­ers, the major draw is that the orga­ni­za­tion has full-time staff who coor­di­nate recy­cling out­reach pro­grams in schools and in the community.

“Based on what I knew, I felt that Eco­maine had a real­ly great edu­ca­tion pro­gram and they work with com­mu­ni­ties to try to reduce garbage over­all,” said MCSWC board mem­ber Cindy Ger­ry of Lincolnville.

Fiberight sup­port­er Ali­son McKel­lar, a Cam­den envi­ron­men­tal activist who runs a web­site ded­i­cat­ed to waste issues, coun­ters that the edu­ca­tion pro­gram is only avail­able to towns that choose to use Ecomaine’s sin­gle-sort option.

“Cur­rent­ly, we actu­al­ly make mon­ey some years on our recy­cling pro­gram, but Eco­maine will charge us $38 per ton to process our recy­cling. That doesn’t include the cost of haul­ing the mate­r­i­al, which is $32/ton,” wrote McKel­lar in a let­ter to munic­i­pal offi­cials. “Cur­rent Eco­maine mem­ber com­mu­ni­ties deliv­er their recy­clables to the facil­i­ty for FREE, but they will charge us the pri­vate hauler rate. Essen­tial­ly, we will be sub­si­diz­ing the Port­land area waste dis­pos­al program.”

Accord­ing to Fiberight, it would charge the same rate as Eco­maine for recy­clables, but haul­ing costs would be low­er because the Ham­p­den facil­i­ty is about 36 miles closer.

The Car­bon Foot­print Question

Eco­maine spokes­woman Lisa Wolff would not com­ment on MRC’s Fiberight pro­pos­al but said that her organization’s employ­ees are “mis­sion-dri­ven cham­pi­ons” of the state’s waste hier­ar­chy mantra: reduce, reuse, recy­cle, com­post, incin­er­ate and, as a last resort, land­fill. Although incin­er­a­tion is only one step above land­fill­ing in the waste hier­ar­chy, she not­ed that Ecomaine’s facil­i­ties have met the ISO 14001 cer­ti­fi­ca­tion, which she called the “gold stan­dard in envi­ron­men­tal man­age­ment systems.”

How­ev­er, MRC waste man­age­ment con­sul­tant George Aron­son of the Boston-based Com­mon­Wealth Resource Man­age­ment Cor­po­ra­tion argues that Fiberight’s bio­gas plan is much more envi­ron­men­tal­ly sus­tain­able. While Eco­maine needs 16,000 Btu to make each kilo­watt hour of elec­tric­i­ty, nat­ur­al gas–fired plants need only 7,000 to 10,000 Btu to make each kWh of elec­tric­i­ty, he said.

“Thus, Eco­maine is much less effi­cient, needs more Btu per kWh gen­er­at­ed, and has far high­er [green­house gas] emis­sions than nat­ur­al gas-fired plants,” wrote Aron­son in an email. “And the whole Eco­maine approach to dis­place­ment of elec­tric­i­ty is less effi­cient than direct dis­place­ment of nat­ur­al gas.”

Accord­ing to the Fiberight plan, the com­pressed nat­ur­al gas pro­duced from house­hold waste will also be used to fuel their trucks, which it esti­mates will dis­place about 100,000 gal­lons of fos­sil fuels a year.

“Eco­maine is 84 miles away from the trans­fer sta­tion and we are 48,” said Fiberight’s CEO, Craig Stu­art-Paul. “So we’re using 48 miles on CNG-pow­ered trucks. Eco­maine is 84 miles on diesel-pow­ered trucks and you can cal­cu­late the air emis­sions from that.”