At town meetings in Camden, Rockport, Hope, and Lincolnville next week, we will be voting on where to send our trash. The warrant article will ask whether we should accept the Mid Coast Solid Waste Board recommendation of entering into a 20 year contract with Ecomaine, an incinerator in Portland, but that only tells half the story.
What the town warrant article leaves out is the fact that this recommendation from our local board was not only heavily divided, but was also a decision to go against the recommendation of a much larger group called the Municipal Review Committee, a group governed by a volunteer board of elected officials, whose sole mission is to seek the most affordable, long-term and environmentally sound solution for waste disposal for the 187 communities it serves.  
Among the elected representatives to the MRC is Jim Guerra, our transfer station manager, well known environmentalist, and recycling pioneer. The group has been working for the past eight years in anticipation of 2018 when our current waste disposal contract ends with the incinerator in Orrington. They have worked tirelessly, soliciting proposals from all over the world in pursuit of a more sustainable and less costly solution for Maine's waste. They settled on Fiberight, an option that has been reviewed extensively by independent consultants, lawyers, engineers, and private investors.
Fiberight uses a process called Mechanical Biological Treatment, a flexible approach to waste treatment that is used in over 330 facilities in Europe. First, the front end of the plant mechanically separates and recovers much of the recyclable material that never should have ended up in the waste stream to begin with (metals, plastics, glass, etc) and then anaerobically digests the the organic material leftover which is turned into biogas .  A simple search online outlines the process. The thing that has some select board members in some towns concerned is that the Fiberight plant will be the first of it's kind in the United States.  The Fiberight facility will be built on a site in Hampden that MRC owns.
All the documents and research backing up the environmental benefits and the fiscal soundness of the decision have been made available and thoroughly peer reviewed. Other towns that have signed on to the MRC's proposal include towns on all sides of us including Belfast, Waldoboro, Bar Harbor, Bangor, Knox, Montville, South Thomaston, Cushing, Brewer, and Boothbay, among many others. While we all recognize that there are some risks with the plan, we believe they are small and the potential benefits to our communities and the environment are significant.
While we think that ecomaine represents a great example of municipalities working together with very good results for residents in the Portland area, the following considerations make the MRC proposal a preferential option for the mid-coast and the state as a whole.

• The MRC proposal would lessen the cost and the carbon footprint.  Trucking our waste to Portland will cost (at current fuel prices)  $80,000 a year more than it will to send our waste to the MRC/Fiberight Hampden facility. The diesel particulate emissions from that much truck traffic are significant.
• A portion of the biogas produced at the facility will be used to power a fleet of CNG powered trucks that transport our waste from our facility to theirs. So instead of diesel, we’d be burning biogas, resulting in a significantly smaller carbon footprint than an EcoMaine decision.
• Ecomaine is AT CAPACITY, meaning that every ton of waste they take from us is a ton of commercial waste from the Portland area that will have to find somewhere else to go, either to a landfill or trucked long distances to some other undetermined facility. The environmental impact of this.
• Sending our trash to Ecomaine does nothing to solve the regional need for another environmentally sustainable waste disposal option in our part of the state.
• If we move to an Ecomaine option we lose our membership status with MRC. If we chose a Fiberight option, we would remain members of the 187 town MRC and be privy to potential tipping fee rebates, which are expected to be significant. We are NOT founding members of EcoMaine, so by default are not privy to rebates.
• Ecomaine does many great things to encourage recycling, yet anything recyclable that ends up in one of our yellow bags or in a downtown trash can or dumpster gets burned. At Fiberight, as in all the materials recovery facilities like it, the waste runs through a mechanical sorting system that recovers much of the plastic, metal, and glass. This means that we can continue to work and improve our recycling system at the transfer station so that less weight in waste is sent to Fiberight, but anything that does mistakenly make it into the waste stream stands a good chance of being recovered and recycled rather than burned.

As an informed and diverse group of citizens from all four towns and we encourage everyone to attend their town meetings next week  (Camden and Rockport are on the 15th, Lincolnville the 16th and Hope the 20th). We believe that our four towns should continue as members of the Municipal Review Committee and are encouraging you to vote no on the MCSWC recommendation that we leave it. The bylaws of the MCSWC require that each of the four member towns that share the transfer station vote  unanimously in favor of any contract over 3 years. A "no" vote from any town will mean that the MCSWC board must reconsider their recommendation and our four towns will have the opportunity to vote again after they have done so.
Also, please enjoy our short video explaining why we think this issue is worth our time and yours. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CeKOdpRvHUE
Alison McKellar, Camden
Rendle Jones, Camden
Beedy Parker, Camden
Barb Callanan Ohland, Camden
Anna Sideris, Lincolnville
Josh Gerritsen, Lincolnville
Dora Lievow, Camden
Meg Barclay, Camden
Geoff Parker, Rockport
Chris Pinchbeck, Hope
Kristen Lindquist, Camden
Tom Resek, Camden
Maggie Timmerman Christie, Rockport
Rick Seibel, Lincolnville
Steve Pixley, Camden
Elizabeth Noble, Camden
Meg Sideris, Camden
Kristin Resek, Camden
Carol Miller, Camden
Kimberlee Harjula Peterson, Rockport
Keirsten Weiver, Rockport
Heather Christie, Rockport
Michelle Gagne Hannan, Rockport
Eleanor Masin-Peters, Camden
Janelle Dishner, Camden
Arlene Jurewicz-Leighton, Lincolnville
Molly McKellar, Lincolnville
Leni S. Gronos, Rockport
Sue Fleming, Camden
Jasmin Pike, Camden
Connie Perret, Camden
Eliza Massey, Hope
Iris Eichenlaub, Hope
Jacob Eichenlaub, Hope
Laura Harjula, Camden
Richard Ailes, Camden
Jenna Lookner, Camden
Hugh McKellar, Camden
Sarah Holland, Camden
Kate McMorrow, Camden
Kenny Robak, Camden
Cindy Gerry, Lincolnville
Vincent Jones, Camden
Vicki Doudera, Camden
Kimberly Mullin Kimball, Rockport
Allison Ridley, McWilliams, Camden
Tess Gerritsen, Camden
Jacob Gerritsen, Camden
Andrea Palise, Lincolnville
Cortney Sukeforth, Camden
Wyatt McConnell, Camden
Anita Brosius-Scott, Camden
Rafi Baeza, Camden
Kathy Swift, Hope
Andy Swift, Hope
Ken Foster
Valerie Levine Foster