They’re digging through Maine’s growing piles of trash to help you make less of it

PORTLAND, Maine — Wyatt Wells wore mirrored sunglasses and thick rubber gloves as he helped paw through several tons of household garbage at ecomaine’s Blueberry Road waste-to-energy facility on Wednesday morning.

Grimy coffee grounds and unidentified ooze clung to everything, while Wells and three colleagues identified every smidgen of waste before separating the fragments into 88 separate categories, each with its own collection bin. Among the options were newspaper, books, old food, pet waste, shrink wrap, drywall, laptops, small appliances and solar panel components.

It smelled bad — really bad.

“Someone’s got to do it,” Wells said, not slowing down. “And, at the end of the day, you get to go home to a good shower.”

Besides, it was all in the name of science, he said.

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The trash-picking was part of a statewide audit of Maine’s waste stream organized by the Maine Department of Environmental Protection. It’s designed to find out what the state’s growing population throws away most, and then help devise ways to divert that material from costly, environmentally unfriendly landfills and trash incinerators.

It’s important because, according to a recent state report , the amount of waste Maine is landfilling each year has gone up significantly over the last decade. At the same time, Maine’s overall recycling rate has remained stagnant, at best, and actually falling in some communities.

It’s the first time state officials have conducted such a statewide survey. In addition to ecomaine’s giant facility, Wells and his team will be picking through trash at other sites including Tri-Community Landfill in Fort Fairfield, Crossroads Landfill in Norridgewock and the state-owned Juniper Ridge Landfill in Old Town.

A federal grant is paying for the study, which costs about $325,000. But in the long run, the goal is for its findings to help reduce the amounts of waste that communities are burying in the ground. That has come at a growing cost to the environment, as well as to taxpayers who must cover the rising costs of disposing of all that waste — both when it’s first sent to the landfill for a fee, and then in some cases, when those landfills reach capacity and must be permanently closed and monitored.

“We want to reduce the amount of material we landfill as much as possible, because landfilling is expensive,” said Brian Beneski, supervisor of recycling programs at Maine DEP. “And right now there’s only so much landfill space available.”

According to a report Beneski helped write, the amount of waste landfilled in Maine rose by 34 percent between 2018 and 2022. This dramatic increase was partially due to the idling of a waste-to-energy facility in Orrington and a waste processing operation in Hampden.

But even with the halt of those operations, Mainers are still throwing away more stuff than ever. The report found that in 2022, they threw away an average of almost four pounds of waste a day, up from just over two pounds in 2012. The total amount landfilled in Maine in 2022 was 1.4 million tons.

To make matters worse, over the same period, the overall per capita recycling rate has dropped slightly, for a total of just about 500,000 tons statewide in 2022.

If current trends hold, Beneski’s department estimates Maine will generate approximately almost 2 million tons of waste annually by 2029.

Beneski, a self-described “waste nerd,” would like to prevent that number from coming true. He hopes the waste audit will help policymakers in Augusta to understand what’s being thrown out and come up with ideas for reducing and reusing more of it.

“I think food waste, and organics in general, make up a pretty high percentage of the waste stream,” Beneski said. “But maybe now clothing is a big percentage of it.”

He hopes to have final numbers and recommendations prepared by spring 2025. But it’s all starting this week with people getting their gloved hands dirty in some pretty gross stuff.

At ecomaine, Wells and his waste-picking crew were expecting to sort through about 2.5 tons of garbage over two days from the 73 communities who send their trash to the recycling and incineration facility.

“Science is almost never pretty,” said Kayla Giannetti, standing next to Wells and wearing a disposable plastic apron. “And we need the data.”