UNITY PLANTATION, Maine — Conservationist Bill Ginn is mad about what happened at the heavily contaminated Hawk Ridge Compost Facility that he started here 35 years ago as a recycling center.
He sold it three years after he started it. Since then, three large waste management companies have owned it, most recently Casella Waste Systems. Now the largest composting facility in the state, Hawk Ridge has processed 150,000 dump trucks worth of mostly papermill solid waste since 1989. Extensive PFAS contamination on and around it forced the company to announce it will close the facility by June of next year.
“What we originally envisioned as a wonderful little organic composting facility that would make great products is now a toxic waste site,” said Ginn, who was chief conservation officer at The Nature Conservancy for 25 years until he retired six years ago. “It’s a terrible tragedy, what’s happened.”
The evolution of Hawk Ridge illustrates how ignorance about PFAS and its dangers allowed the problem to grow in Maine, even under the watch of environmentalists and regulators. Ginn, who thought his compost and sludge operations would help farmers and municipalities find a beneficial use for solid waste, ended up playing an unwitting role in one of the state’s worst environmental crises.
The Bangor Daily News was the first to report the Hawk Ridge closure plans in September. Ginn was alarmed to read that it was still operating and taking in solid waste from other states, even after Maine’s 2022 law that outlawed the spread on land of sludge — the liquidy product of wastewater treatment and industrial plants — and products like compost derived from it.
Ginn started Hawk Ridge in 1989. PFAS did not enter the scientific lexicon until the late 1990s. The chemicals were not widely known in Maine until reports emerged in 2019 about contamination at an Arundel dairy farm. When Ginn’s businesses started, the regulatory focus was on testing for heavy metals and organic chemicals.
A 2001 report by a citizens group warned about hazardous chemicals in sludge and the dangers of waste spreading.
Some towns, including nearby Clinton, pushed back on sludge spreading around that time. Residents at a 1998 meeting questioned the state’s licensing of two dairy farmers to accept sewage sludge on their fields. The opponents worried about foul odors, reduced property values and contamination of nearby strawberry fields.
“Something might pop up in 10, 15, 20 years — who knows how long,” Gary Richards, a dairy farmer and selectboard candidate who opposed the use of sewage sludge, said in what turned out to be a prescient statement quoted in the BDN.
The Maine Department of Environmental Protection issued licenses for spreading sludge compost and for plants like Ginn’s to produce it. There were hundreds more like it across the country. Sludge is what remains after raw sewage is treated and the water is removed. It is rich in nitrogen, phosphorus, organic matter and other nutrients.
Farmers long saw it as a potent fertilizer. A Bangor horticulturist called composted wastewater sludge “black gold” for vegetables and flowers in a 1988 BDN garden column. A Hawk Ridge official said in 2009 that its compost was “cleaner than dirt.”
In the late 1980s, the DEP required tests of incoming municipal sludge, the composting process, the finished product and various locations around Hawk Ridge.
They checked for chemicals including dioxin, a byproduct of bleaching paper pulp and burning waste that was linked to liver and reproductive damage, and metals including lead, chromium and mercury, according to a license granted then to Hawk Ridge. The regulator also required that the sludge not pollute any water or ambient air and not constitute a hazard to health.
Only after the 2019 revelation of PFAS in Arundel did Maine require expansive PFAS testing at compost facilities, at fields that had been spread with sludge and in private wells nearby. Sludge often includes PFAS that gets into the waste stream from industrial refuse and consumer products with water-resistant coatings.
Ginn said his goal was to create a general-purpose recycling company across New England. Early on, the facility sold compost and compost-blended products, bark mulch, erosion control mix and peat moss to customers including soil blenders, nurseries, landscapers and general contractors throughout the northeast.
One of the earliest graduates of College of the Atlantic, an environmentally focused college in Bar Harbor, Ginn is known for his campaign work for Maine’s “bottle bill,” which was passed by referendum in 1976 and upheld by voters three years later. Before setting up the composting facility, he was executive director at Maine Audubon.
He formed the company Resource Conservation Services in 1983. At the beginning, his biggest clients were the wood-fired boilers that were generating electricity in northern New England. They produced wood ash that farmers used to lower their soil’s acidity. That lucrative recycling business, which at its peak had 250 employees in four northeast states, led to looking for more products for the agricultural community.
Land application was a seasonal business because the product could not be spread on frozen fields. That’s where Ginn got the idea to build a second business, a compost facility, which could accept sludge year round and produce and store a saleable product. Hundreds of composting facilities were being built all over the country in the late 1980s.
When Hawk Ridge, which was then a dairy farm in the unorganized territory of Unity Plantation, came up for sale, he jumped at the opportunity to buy it. The 60 acres of farmland were on two roads off of Route 139, Reynolds Road and Palmer Road, in an area that over the years has had fewer than 40 residents.
Ginn’s primary market was the wastewater treatment plants in small towns nearby, which paid the company to take solid waste. He characterized the compost business as a low-tech one with a few buildings taking only in-state waste.
At the time, he didn’t know about PFAS. There were no tests for it nor standards for whether there was any PFAS in any of the materials his companies handled. Under different owners, Hawk Ridge won accolades for its reuse of sewage sludge as compost, including from the federal government, the governor’s office and industry awards as recently as 2021 and 2024.
“Those of us who knew Bill Ginn thought of him as a serious conservationist,” said Brownie Carson, who retired in 2010 after 26 years as executive director of the Natural Resources Council of Maine. “From my perspective, if Bill had any inkling that there was this kind of problem, he never would have gone down that road.”
Ginn named the facility after his sheep farm in Pownal, which was named on a 1987 letter the DEP required him to send to abutting landowners as a condition of getting a permit. In it, he described his company and tried to reassure neighbors by noting his experience with treated sludge.
“I have had my home farm … licensed for these materials for several years and have found them to be excellent sources of fertilizers and an environmentally sound method of farming,” he wrote.
Years later, high levels of PFAS were found on farms spread with sludge and at the compost operation. A 2023 state monitoring report found that water on one of the Palmer Road properties near Hawk Ridge measured 41,640 parts per trillion of a total of 15 types of PFAS, one of the highest levels in the state. Maine’s upper limit for a total of six PFAS is 20 parts per trillion. The person living at that home did not respond when the BDN tried to interview them recently.
It’s unclear when exactly the contamination began. Casella has noted that materials containing PFAS were spread on farmland in the area before the compost facility was set up. George Belmont, who has managed the facility for 29 years, said the ownership changes he has experienced allowed for more investment in the facility and put the onus on the chemical companies that created the “forever chemicals.”
“The actions of chemical producers and manufacturers of products containing PFAS are devaluing the economic and environmental benefits that can be derived from [treated sludge], while also increasing the costs of managing them,” he said.
Experts on PFAS said the chemicals entered Maine’s waste stream as far back as the 1970s through land application of sludge, but they went undetected for decades. PFAS has been used widely in consumer and industrial products since the 1950s. In the early 1960s a toxicologist at DuPont, a major manufacturer of PFAS, warned that the chemicals enlarged rat and rabbit livers, according to an Environmental Working Group report. A 3M manual from 1963 deemed PFAS toxic, EWG said.
The slowly unfolding story of PFAS toxicity follows earlier patterns of harmful substances, advocates said. Carson drew a parallel to the cigarette companies knowing for decades that smoke, tar and carcinogenic components were dangerous to humans, long before the public health community and regulators knew.
Ginn agreed, saying the real culprits are the chemical companies. He said they must have known much more about the persistence and impacts of their chemicals than they let their customers know, and yet they continued to market them.
“We end up now with the debacle that we have here in the state of Maine,” Ginn said. “We have to hold them accountable.”
Lori Valigra reports on the environment for the BDN’s Maine Focus investigative team. Reach her at [email protected]. Support for this reporting is provided by the Unity Foundation, the Broad Reach Foundation and donations by BDN readers.
