ecomaine’s journey began with a landfill: in 1974, four communities came together to jointly purchase the property in response to a new Maine law calling for the closing of privately owned landfills. It opened as a landfill in 1976 and has been evolving to sustainably and safely store Maine’s waste for nearly half a century.
Spanning across parts of South Portland and Scarborough, ecomaine’s property includes about 45 acres of closed landfill containing municipal solid waste (MSW), and roughly 50 acres of active landfill. Ash from ecomaine’s waste-to-energy facility is trucked to the landfill and carefully stored in these active cells, where a system of environmental monitoring measures and safeguards minimize the waste’s environmental impact. We install underground drainage systems (pipes, wicks, stone-lined out-flow beds); there are a series of five ponds which cleanse surface waters by using a more natural method that includes planted cattails to absorb iron; and there are more than 200 monitoring points throughout the landfill. In addition, we have a synthetically lined holding-pond.
ecomaine opened a new 3.3 acre cell in 2025. Landfilling ash from the waste-to-energy plant rather than unprocessed solid waste reduces volume and extends the life of these each cell by as much as 90%. Another advantage of landfilling ash: unprocessed trash in a landfill decomposes, generating acidic, heavy metal-bearing leachate that could contaminate ground and surface water. In ash form, however, the heavy metals are stabilized into compounds such as hydroxides and sulfates that remain in the ash and pose minimal risk of release into the environment.
Learn more about ecomaine’s Landfill
