Thirty-one people will be laid off from the Orrington trash incinerator as the plant’s foreclosure auction continues to be delayed.
A Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification was posted on Tuesday, saying
Esoco Orrington, LLC will lay off 31 people. The foreclosed Penobscot Energy Recovery Co., or PERC, had 55 full-time employees as of June.
No further information about the layoffs was immediately available Wednesday.
PERC, which stopped operations May 2, was supposed to go to a foreclosure auction in July. It was delayed until August, and then delayed again until Sept. 27, according to sale facilitator Keenan Auction Co. Inc. of Portland.
PERC continued accepting trash from Orrington residents until this week, Town Manager Chris Backman said Wednesday. The plant took trash from Orrington residents with the hope that the new buyer would restart operations.
Orrington residents won’t notice a difference to their trash pickup, Backman said. Trash will be routed to landfills, including the state-owned Juniper Ridge Landfill in Old Town.
PERC, a 40-acre facility, located off of River Road, also known as Route 15, once took trash from 44 communities and commercial waste haulers.
The trash was burned to make electricity, and burned 315,000 tons of trash in 2017, its last full year of operation.
After losing business to the new Hampden trash plant, PERC started falling behind on bills in 2019. The Coastal Resources of Maine plant in Hampden closed in June 2020, after a year of operations, because of financial hardship.
