The case for expanding the Juniper Ridge Landfill

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Peter Lyford represents Maine Senate District 10, which includes communities in Penobscot and Hancock counties. He is the Senate Republican lead on the Legislature’s State and Local Government Committee and the Environmental and Natural Resources Committee.

We have a trash problem. When the Maine Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) presented their annual waste report to the Legislature’s Environment and Natural Resources Committee, of which I am a member, in January, it showed Mainers threw away nearly 50 percent more garbage in 2022 than four years prior.

Maine’s eight landfills that are licensed to accept municipal solid waste took in 515,474 tons of it in 2022. More than half went to the state-owned Juniper Ridge Landfill in Old Town, while the other seven — including six municipally owned and one commercially owned — took the rest.

But that’s not all we generate. Maine disposed of more than 1.785 million tons of total waste in 2022, including construction and demolition debris and other cover waste, incinerated ash from our three trash-to-energy plants, and other special wastes such as municipal sludge and pulp.

So, yes, we are as wasteful as ever. According to Maine DEP data, Mainers create about 1,375 pounds of waste on a per capita basis each year. You could argue it’s the byproduct of our disposable society, one that prefers to replace rather than repair and where everything is packaged to the hilt.

It’s also due to a confluence of factors at both the state and local levels that has left us with fewer recycling or diversion alternatives, including the loss of the Penobscot Energy Recovery Co. facility in Orrington and the failure of Hampden’s trash sorting facility. It seems the trash compactor is closing in all around us.

That’s why I wasn’t surprised to hear that Casella Waste Systems, the operator of Juniper Ridge through its New England Waste Services of Maine landfill operations division, applied to expand the capacity of the 122-acre landfill that is filling up fast. At its current run rate of about 1 million cubic feet per year, the landfill only has about four years left until it reaches capacity and must be closed.

Built in 1996 by Fort James/Georgia-Pacific, the 68-acre landfill was operated by the company to handle waste from Georgia-Pacific’s paper mill in Old Town. The 121st Legislature passed LD 1626 in 2003 directing the state to purchase the landfill and Georgia-Pacific operated it until it was sold to the state in 2004.

The landfill was expanded in 2017 , which added 54 acres to its footprint and about 9.3 million cubic yards to its capacity. Today, Casella is seeking approval to add about 11.9 million more cubic yards to Juniper Ridge, or about 61 acres to its footprint. In doing so, Casella said it would extend the life of Maine’s largest landfill by about 11 years.

And it appears we don’t have much of a choice. Juniper Ridge is the only state-owned landfill operating. Dolby in Millinocket is in its final phase of closure and Carpenter Ridge in Lincoln still hasn’t been built. It is also by far the largest, with 556,446 tons of total waste accepted in 2018 that has grown to nearly 1 million tons in 2022, according to the DEP report.

The next largest is Crossroads in Norridgewock, which is owned and operated by Waste Management Disposal Services and accepts not even a third of what Juniper Ridge does.

Yet the problem — and my initial point — is that the trash we’re generating is growing as well. The DEP projects that waste generated in Maine will reach 2 million tons by 2034, long after Juniper Ridge is expected to close. And with only two of the state’s three trash-to-energy plants currently operating, we’re not even hitting our waste reduction goals.

The bottom line is four years is not much time to come up with an alternative; and expanding its current capacity is really the only option we have. While it is expected that PERC’s successor, the new Eagle Point Energy Center , will be operational sometime next year , that facility stopped accepting waste when it closed last year, which only accelerated the landfill problem.

The DEP is expected to issue its decision Aug. 23 regarding the public benefit of the proposed expansion. It should find that it is beneficial and Maine’s Bureau of General Services should grant the expansion. It buys us time; and I’m sure no one wants to be left burying our own trash in our own backyards come 2028.