On March 22, the Brunswick Town Council held a workshop session on Recycling and Municipal Solid Waste options. On April 5, the town manager has said he will ask them to approve a move to ecomaine for processing our municipal waste and single-stream recycling.
Following extensive analysis of the dollar and environmental costs and savings to be realized by such a move, the Brunswick Recycling and Sustainability Committee has strongly recommended the move. There is currently an opening in the ecomaine waste-to-energy plant sufficient to accept our municipal waste for many years, but, if we don’t take the opportunity, it will disappear by this fall, and there are no other viable options on the horizon.
It is imperative that our councilors recognize the importance of making the move, and that means they all need to hear from as many of us as possible, and it needs to be done this week! This is a move that will immediately save us more than $444,000 a year in out-of-pocket expenses for solid waste management over the system we now use. Please take the time to make your message heard. The town councilors and their email addresses are listed at brunswickme.org/331/Town-Council.
Ecomaine is the least expensive processor of municipal solid waste and single-stream recycling. There is a slight increase in transportation costs, but that’s more than offset by the savings.
U.S. manufacturers have been making additional commitments to use recycled inputs, and the value of recycled commodities has been improving. Since we get a rebate for the value of the recycled materials, this offers the potential for even lower future net costs.
At no additional cost, ecomaine provides high-quality, value-added services to contracting municipalities. These are services we do not get today. They include:
· Extensive and proactive community education programs on recycling and waste reduction, with four full-time people on their staff, plus seasonal interns;
· Weekly electronic newsletters on local solid waste and recycling issues, best practices, program updates, and state policies;
· Monitoring of contamination levels in every load of recycling collected, providing the town instant feedback, and helping us lower costs. Currently, our recycling is mixed with material from several other towns before contamination is assessed. Reduced contamination is key to increasing the commodity value of our recycling, but we make no gains from our improvement in the current system. We make big gains under ecomaine, where our contamination will be measured at each load.
Ecomaine is an active advocate for effective policies to promote recycling and Maine’s solid waste hierarchy, the model Maine uses for reducing, reusing, and recycling our waste products;
Using a waste-to-energy strategy, to convert trash to electricity, as opposed to a landfill destination, would move our waste management up one position on the waste hierarchy ladder that the state of Maine adopted in 1989 as a statewide goal. It will also immediately reduce our town’s Green House Gas emissions by a highly significant 2,500 metric tons per year of CO2 equivalent, bringing us a major step closer to goals proposed in the Town Council’s Climate Change Resolution adopted in December 2019.
Municipalities served by ecomaine provide more waste in the summer months due to summer tourism than the furnaces can handle on a daily basis. Ecomaine can store its excess on-site to burn in leaner winter months, ensuring that all solid waste is converted into energy. Maine Waste-to-Energy in Auburn has no storage capacity for summer excess, necessitating diversion of it to a landfill with its attendant greenhouse gas emissions.
Ecomaine recycles a much greater variety of materials: e.g. glass and coated boxboard (ice cream cartons, milk and juice cartons, aseptic food containers). Our current single-stream processor sends these materials to a landfill.
Waste-to-energy reduces trash to 1/10th its original volume. This ash is processed to remove all the metal for recycling. The remaining ash is then disposed of in ecomaine’s secure landfill, located near its waste-to-energy facility.
Ecomaine has the most energy-efficient waste-to-energy conversion system, such that it produces 2 ½ times the amount of electricity per ton of solid waste than the Maine Waste-to-Energy plant.
Ecomaine is state-of-the-art and a municipally-owned not-for-profit-corporation. It will remain viable for the life of our contract. Other options cannot make that guarantee, so we could be seeing our trash or recycling being diverted to a landfill again if we fail to switch.
Harry Hopcroft is a member of the Brunswick Recycling and Sustainability Committee.
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