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Jul 04, 2023

State orders permanent closure of Bucksport landfill

The state has ordered the permanent closure of a Bucksport landfill that it says has been relatively dormant in recent years and has not been properly maintained. The Maine Department of Environmental

The state has ordered the permanent closure of a Bucksport landfill that it says has been relatively dormant in recent years and has not been properly maintained.

The Maine Department of Environmental Protection notified AIM, the mill’s owner, that the landfill is in violation of its operating permit. The state agency also said that AIM must develop a plan to permanently close the landfill and provide to the state a schedule for completing the work.

“Please submit the plan by January 1, 2024, and plan to complete closure construction in the 2026 construction season,” Karen Knuuti of the DEP’s division of materials management wrote in an Aug. 4 letter to Bucksport Mill, the AIM subsidiary that owns the 109-acre site.

Officials with AIM and its hired consulting firm, Haley Ward, did not respond Tuesday to emailed requests for comment.

The landfill was owned by a series of companies that operated the former local paper mill, which ceased operations in 2014. American Iron and Metal bought the property to demolish the mill and sell off the scrap, and at the same time acquired the landfill, which is located off Route 15 across the road from the former mill site.

The state’s operating permit for the landfill restricts it to being used only for wood waste and construction and demolition debris that is generated directly at the former mill property by its owner. AIM has since divided and sold off the former mill property and, because it does not generate any such waste, the landfill essentially has been dormant for the past several years.

Last fall, AIM contacted the town to suggest that the two could partner to revive operations at the site. New privately owned landfills are not allowed in Maine, but if AIM gave ownership of the property to the town, the company could operate the landfill and accept wood waste and construction and demolition debris, with Bucksport getting a share of the resulting tipping fees.

Area residents who say the landfill is an environmental hazard opposed the plan, however, and town officials expressed some skepticism about the idea. In order to find out more about the condition of the landfill, the town started requesting information about the landfill from the DEP.

“If someone tries to sell you something, you have to check to see what you would be buying,” Susan Lessard, Bucksport’s town manager, said Tuesday.

Lessard said Bucksport was not happy that the landfill does not have a liner to keep out water infiltration and that untreated leachate from the landfill flows directly into the Penobscot River, even though both these things are allowed under the landfill’s operating permit. She said that as it researched the condition of the site, the town also adopted a local landfill operation ordinance, in order to give it some regulatory control over how the landfill would be operated if AIM sought out a different municipal partner for the property.

Lessard said the elected town council hasn’t formally weighed in on the DEP’s order to permanently close the landfill, but that no town officials have advocated for keeping it going.

Shutting it down “would be in the best interests of everyone,” said Lessard, who also serves as chair of the state’s Board of Environmental Protection. “It seems to make good sense.”

The state, in turn, compiled a list of issues about the landfill that need to be addressed just in order to comply with its license. Among them, according to the Aug. 4 letter, was providing annual proof of adequate liability insurance, documentation of regular inspections, annual water quality test results, and maintenance work and subsequent inspections of various parts of the landfill’s leachate collection system, among other things.

Other issues that AIM was supposed to address in 2022 still have not been fixed and, since 2014, the state has been telling AIM that the north slope of the landfill needs be permanently closed — but that also has not been done.

“This is not acceptable,” Knuuti wrote in the letter. “The work should have been done in 2015, then in 2016, then in 2018. Plans, drawings, and construction documents were approved.”

Beyond addressing these issues, Knuuti said that because AIM no longer generates any licensed waste at the former mill site, which is the only permitted material that can be deposited at the landfill, the landfill must be permanently closed.

Officials with the state agency did not respond to a request for comment about the order to permanently close the landfill.

A news reporter in coastal Maine for more than 20 years, Bill Trotter writes about how the Atlantic Ocean and the state's iconic coastline help to shape the lives of coastal Maine residents and visitors.... More by Bill Trotter