The Orrington trash incinerator should be back up and running in four weeks, the new owner said.
The foreclosed Penobscot Energy Recovery Co. plant was sold Nov. 12 after a third auction. The new owner, C&M Faith holdings, wants to start processing the trash in the plant in four weeks. The company’s engineer will visit the week of Nov. 27 to get everything moving, co-owner Mark Boswell said.
C&M Faith holdings bought the plant for $1.2 million, less than 10 percent of the assessed value of PERC, which is about $13 million for tax purposes. The plant owes about $765,000 in real estate and personal property taxes. The company, owned by Bill Richardson from Little Rock, Arkansas, and Boswell from Sarasota, Florida, closed on the purchase Wednesday.
The incinerator closed in May and stopped accepting trash from Orrington in September after it became full. The plan is to process that trash — around 10,000 tons — first before accepting new trash, Boswell said.
The 35-year-old plant also has a new name. It’s now called the Garbage Recycling and Clean Energy plant, or GRACE, Boswell said. He acknowledged that it will take a long time for people to get used to the change.
Processing the trash may need assistance from something like wood pellets because of how long the trash has been sitting, gathering water and moisture. The plant had a fire Nov. 6 caused by spontaneous combustion in the trash as it heated up.
Getting the trash off the ground and processing it is the first concern, Boswell said. Only one of the two boilers at the plant is operational. After processing the trash in the plant, the facility needs to repair the second one, he said.
That will allow the plant to scale up, start accepting trash and bring more employees back, he said.
Around 30 people were furloughed when the plant closed in September. The majority of those employees will come back as the plant gets up and running again.
“Everybody there is very knowledgeable, been there many years and understands the process that they use,” he said.
C&M Faith holdings is talking with local municipalities about accepting their trash, Boswell said. He said the company is looking forward to offering a place for people to take their trash that isn’t a landfill.
The 40-acre facility located off of River Road, also known as Route 15, had been taking waste from 44 communities and commercial waste haulers in recent years.
Trash was burned to make electricity, and the facility burned 315,000 tons of trash in 2017, its last year of full operations.
