As Maine towns are seeing their waste disposal costs continue to climb, some towns and other groups are looking for ways to reduce the tonnage they truck to landfills.
Towns can pay about $1,000 per ton of trash they send to the Juniper Ridge landfill in Old Town — but more than a quarter of what they’re paying for may not be trash at all.
“It seems ridiculous to be sending food to a landfill in 2026 when we have higher and better solutions,” said Kate Tomkins, who collects and composts food waste for households and businesses at her Chickadee Compost facility in Surry.
As of last month, she also picks up food waste from Deer Isle at its transfer station, the first town in the county to start such an on-site program.
As Maine’s trash crisis wears on, local interest in keeping waste out of landfills is growing for both environmental and financial reasons. Community composting examples in two Maine towns show a path for Mainers to address how much they throw out and the costs of doing so, though it’s still in early stages. Waste management systems also aren’t structurally designed to divert significant amounts of organic matter yet, but many people in the region are interested in trying, Tomkins said.
Juniper Ridge is expected to run out of space in 2028 as a contested expansion plan slowly proceeds. Two other facilities that converted and recycled waste in eastern Maine have been mostly offline for years but are trying to reopen.
Meanwhile, food waste takes up space and emits methane, a greenhouse gas that contributes to climate change.
The positive environmental impact and reduced disposal costs from composting prompted the Bar Harbor Garden Club to start a pickup program with Chickadee Compost and the Maine Coast Heritage Trust 18 months ago, according to Barbara Amstutz, a member who then was the club president. It also created an option for people without the space, ability or desire to compost at home.
Currently, 60 MDI households participate, dropping scraps at the trust’s Stone Barn Farm in Bar Harbor. More than 30,000 pounds have been composted.
The club’s effort provided a model for how a community compost program could work, Amstutz said, and interest has followed from area towns and institutions.
“We started the conversation on the island about, ‘It can be done,’” she said.
Taking action against climate change motivated Tomkins to start her company, which composted more than 550,000 pounds of food scraps last year. It’s grown from the Blue Hill peninsula to work with MDI institutions and schools, along with organizations in Ellsworth.
At her facility, food waste is mixed with wood chips and mouse bedding from the Jackson Laboratory to start the yearlong process of breaking it down into nutrient-rich compost. Subscribers who pay for weekly compost collection from Chickadee get two free bags a year; she’s also “very competitive” with traditional disposal costs, Tomkins said.
Compost improves soil structure for gardening and can release nutrients for years. It helps plants thrive in heavy clay soil and lets sandy soil hang on to nutrients and water, according to Mark King, who has led compost training for decades through the Maine Department of Environmental Protection.
“I consider it defibrillating the soil back to life,” he said.
When he started the Maine Compost School in 1997, people didn’t generally have much interest in composting, he said. There’s been a “tremendous” change.
The school has taught more than 1,000 people from 42 countries about the “art and science” of compost. After five days, attendees know enough to manage their own compost facility, King said.
He’s aiming to reach even more people and build composting infrastructure as the state prepares for a law taking effect in 2030 that requires big producers of food waste, like schools and hospitals, to divert it from landfills if there are other options within 20 miles.
The state has added programs such as an online Master Community Composter course through the Maine Resource Recovery Association in preparation, King said. He runs the school by himself, which led to a deadline extension for the law, but expects more staff to be available in the coming years.
The state’s solid waste management priority list puts composting after reducing, reusing and recycling. For food, that means avoiding waste to begin with, donating before it spoils or, as a third resort, feeding it to farm animals.
Towns can start composting programs in-house or contract with outside companies. There’s a stronger historical presence of community composting in southern Maine, where larger populations generate more waste, according to King. In eastern Maine, outside collection appears to have the edge.
Castine recently received a DEP waste diversion grant to start a project educating residents about backyard composting and potentially coordinating with Chickadee Compost for those who don’t want to compost themselves.
Amstutz said her club’s experience has shown the importance of partnerships for any small community wanting to start a program. The garden club couldn’t have done it alone, she said, noting the need for know-how, facilities, transportation and processing that their three-party contract provides.
Composting through Chickadee is expected to save on disposal costs in Deer Isle, according to Town Manager Jim Fisher. The company was already picking up crab waste generated by local pickers as the town works to divert more waste because of uncertainty about regional disposal options.
Tomkins originally planned to create dropoff areas at transfer stations like Deer Isle’s rather than the subscriber pickup model she uses now, saying the easiest entry point is to reach people where they’re already going.
But contracts which required towns to send waste to existing regional processors prevented that. Southwest Harbor faces a similar issue with a contract as its sustainability committee explores municipal composting, according to Amstutz.
Tomkins said those hurdles point to how existing waste management systems aren’t structured to divert food waste, and more investment is needed. She still wants to add transfer station sites in the coming years.
The resulting product is particularly useful for gardening on the acidic, rocky soils across much of Hancock County, she said.
King pushes to “keep those nutrients in the same ZIP code,” or make compost where the waste is generated. He sees it as a road to community self-reliance.
There’s no comprehensive number of Maine towns that compost, as some start small enough that they don’t have to report their operations. But at least a dozen communities are actively composting or trying to, he said.
King continues to help them and refresh their education once they start. If something goes wrong, he’s found, it could turn a community against the idea.
Well-managed compost won’t smell or attract critters like rats, he said, but memories of bad experiences with improper composting are one of the major hurdles to starting new programs.
In Fisher’s view, the biggest challenges to recycling are people who don’t care enough to pay attention and people who care so much that they wishfully add materials that can’t be reused; he wondered if household composting would face a similar issue, but so far it doesn’t seem to, he said.
It hasn’t been a big issue for Chickadee either, according to Tomkins. She occasionally finds plastic straws and forks from school cafeteria contributions that she picks out by hand.
Fisher also wants to start collecting compost from the island’s school cafeteria, but said it’s been a slow process.
Change tends to happen slowly in rural Maine, Tomkins said, and though waste already is a big issue for area towns, suggesting changes and making sure staff are on board has been a challenge. But she sees a lot of room for more composting.
“There’s just so much potential,” she said. “I feel like I’ve really just scratched the surface, countywide.”
