Deer Isle’s municipal transfer station has seen big changes in recent years. Gone are the giant piles of contaminated ash, tires and waste that once reminded Jim Fisher, the town manager, of the Andes Mountains.
On a recent Wednesday morning, a steady procession of people in trucks and sedans pulled up to drop off garbage and recycling, look through the swap shop and pick through the scrap metal pile.
More changes are ahead: Soon, the town will redesign the station for easier navigation among the stops. It also plans to purchase a cardboard compactor and may expand its composting contract with the Surry company that repurposes its crab waste.
Deer Isle has made a concentrated effort to recycle and divert more waste from the landfill like this in recent years, according to Fisher. The changes don’t save the town money, but it pursues them in direct response to uncertainty around the future of waste disposal options across eastern Maine.
The town had long sent its garbage to a waste-to-energy incinerator in Orrington, but that facility has been closed since 2023 and last operated at full capacity eight years ago. The recent shuttering has resulted in more waste from Deer Isle and other towns going straight to the state-owned Juniper Ridge Landfill in Old Town, rather than being burned to generate electricity.
Some communities with contracts to the incinerator are unbothered; others are uncertain about when the Orrington plant will reopen and whether they could be drawn into a lawsuit a previous owner has filed against the current one. Despite all that, towns are largely still standing by the facility given contracts they have to send their waste there when it reopens.
“We’re in a bad spot,” Fisher said of the regional options for waste management. “I don’t have a good answer. That’s why I think we should do the right thing and recycle.”
Few good options
Many towns across eastern, central and northern Maine are familiar with the challenges. For decades, they belonged to an organization called the Municipal Review Committee that sent its trash to the Orrington plant, previously known as Penobscot Energy Recovery Center, or PERC.
But in 2018, 115 of the MRC members split off from PERC after it lost a favorable power-purchase agreement that had allowed it to keep disposal prices down. Fearful of price spikes, the communities instead backed the construction of a new waste processing plant in Hampden.
Deer Isle was one of 42 Maine municipalities that continued to send its waste to PERC. For a time, its choice appeared to be a shrewd one: The competitor in Hampden has faced many struggles, including delays in opening. It then operated for just several months before shutting down in 2020 after running out of money. The MRC has since rebranded as Municipal WasteHub, bought the closed-down Hampden plant and worked to reopen it. It now says it’ll be fully operational at the end of the year.
But in the meantime, similar challenges have crept up on the Orrington incinerator. It shut down in 2023 because of financial problems, has been the site of several trash fires and its reopening has been delayed as it has passed between new owners.
After PERC’s foreclosure in 2023, it was first purchased and renamed the Garbage Recycling and Clean Energy plant, or GRACE. Eagle Point Energy Center then bought it at auction the following year and took on contracts totalling at least $2.5 million to handle roughly 31,000 tons of waste annually for the 42 municipalities.
The plant’s reopening was delayed by a fire last year, but it began operating as a transfer station. Owners plan to reopen fully late in 2026, they previously told the BDN.
PERC has since sued EPEC, claiming those contracts weren’t included in the sale, and asked a judge to handle the payments until that suit is settled. Deer Isle and other towns that pay EPEC now receive regular cease-and-desist letters from PERC. A judge has heard arguments from both sides and will issue a ruling in the coming weeks on whether towns could be added to that lawsuit.
Officials from several of the towns said they aren’t concerned about the lawsuit, but the closure has brought other challenges.
Sending more waste to Juniper Ridge is contributing to the fast rate at which the state landfill is reaching capacity; it’s projected to run out of space in three years unless it expands. A proposal to expand it is facing its own legal challenge.
The growth of that landfill comes even as Maine views waste-to-energy as a more environmentally friendly way to dispose of trash, given that the resulting ash takes up less space in the ground.
How towns are affected
While that’s not necessarily a concern for most municipalities, it has forced some of them to pay more for carrying trash all the way to the landfill.
In Warren, the town pays a hauler another $200 per load of trash one or two days a week to take it to Old Town instead of Orrington, according to Town Manager Sherry Howard. Her town also sends recycling to a regional facility.
“At this point, we don’t feel there’s a concern,” she said. “From what I’m understanding and seeing and hearing, we should be able to start utilizing our options the way we had in the past.”
About two hours north, in the small Penobscot County town of Winn, Selectman Robert Berry also isn’t concerned about the closure of the Orrington plant or the region’s larger waste struggles.
However, Berry said that garbage is one of the most expensive items in an expanding budget that’s crushing the town. Residents have a transfer station and roadside trash pickup from a private company, with paper recycling once a month. There’s not enough money in recycling glass or aluminum to make it worth buying the necessary machinery, according to Berry.
If anything, he’s paying attention to whether the expansion of Juniper Ridge goes forward. If it doesn’t and waste has to be trucked a longer distance, he expects transportation bills to increase.
“We’re not looking forward to that,” he said.
Another option?
The ongoing closure of the Orrington plant does raise questions about whether some towns that have stuck with it could eventually decide to join the 115 communities that split apart from it almost a decade ago to send their waste to the Hampden facility instead.
If MunicipalWaste Hub’s facility was fully operational and appeared stable, Fisher would urge the Deer Isle Select Board to consider joining it, he said. But for now, it’s not clear the town would be any better off getting out of its contract with EPEC.
Municipal WasteHub has recently received “notable interest” in new memberships, according to its executive director, Michael Carroll. Carroll could not confirm whether any of that interest came from towns contracted with EPEC.
New communities can join MunicipalWaste Hub as “non-associate members,” which get similar benefits but don’t hold an ownership stake and get smaller discounts, Carroll said. Non-charter members must now pay $89.62 to send waste to its facility.
At EPEC, tipping fees went up to $93 per ton this spring for the town of Stockton Springs and could increase again, according to Select Board minutes. The fees for other towns to send their waste to EPEC weren’t available.
BDN writer Marie Weidmayer contributed reporting.
