Maine
Burning tires for fuel behind Maine's increase in toxic chemicals
A few weeks ago, a series of press releases from the Environmental Protection Agency hit my email inbox in quick succession. The subject headlines were near-identical, trumpeting a decrease in toxic chemical releases to air, land and water in states across New England.
That was until an email with Maine’s results popped up. From 2021 to 2022, Maine was the only state in the region to see a net increase of 10 percent in toxic chemical releases.
The reasoning was vague, stating an increase in toxic waste sent to landfills, where solid waste went up 47 percent between 2018 and 2022.
Chris Rascher, the compliance and program coordinator for EPA’s Toxic Release Inventory program in New England, provided context on zinc, one of the chemicals behind the 10 percent increase.
Between 2021 and 2022, the amount of zinc released in Maine increased significantly, resulting in a net increase of the state’s overall release of TRI-listed chemicals. The source? Maine’s two largest paper and pulp mills: ND Paper in Rumford and Sappi North America’s Somerset Mill in Skowhegan.
Rascher learned that the mills increased their use of shredded tires as a fuel source to power operations. Burning tires and filtering the emissions produces a zinc-heavy ash.
Because of its high zinc levels, which are especially harmful to aquatic life, the ash has to be disposed with special precautions to avoid it leaching into nearby water and soil or blowing away in the wind.
Rascher said disposing of tires through combustion helps solve the thornier problem of managing them in landfills, where they can catch fire, burning uncontrollably and giving off pollutants.
“Every state generates an awful lot of used tires that then have to go somewhere,” Rascher said. “And what people discovered is that there are problems with saving a lot of tires and landfills.”
As opposed to burning in a landfill, the emissions of ‘tire-derived fuel’ in facilities can be filtered by special equipment. Burning tires for energy can also supplement the use of coal or heavy fuel oil, reducing overall reliance on the two.
Eric Kennedy, director of licensing and compliance for the Air Bureau at the Maine Department of Environmental Protection, said the department worked with paper mills in the early 1990s to help develop tire fuel.
At the time, tires were menacing Maine’s landfills, Kennedy said, leading to a large fire in the Bowdoinham town landfill in the 1980s with smoke visible for several miles.
Tire-derived fuel seemed like a way out.
“People started figuring out, ‘What can we do with tires instead of putting them in piles and waiting for them to burn?’ ” Kennedy said.
Although burning tires emits more zinc than coal, it emits less sulfur dioxides — potent pollutants that can cause acid rain and respiratory problems in humans.
Still, burning tires as fuel does not eliminate all emissions. Kennedy said Maine mills use specialized equipment to scrub particulates from emissions.
Back to solid waste and Maine’s landfills, both ND Paper and Sappi North America said they send their tire fuel ash to their own landfills, which are lined and have leachate control systems.
DEP spokesman David Madore said that the department would prefer to reduce the amount of tires in Maine landfills. But the paper mills’ use of tires as fuel would only lead to reductions of tires in Maine’s landfills if they sourced them from in-state.
ND Paper said the Rumford mill brings shredded tires from across New England and added that the company’s use of tires reduces its reliance on coal.
Sappi, meanwhile, said it sources its shredded tires in-state. Sappi spokesman Peter Steele said the increased use of tire-derived fuel stems from market shifts that made the company’s preferred use of natural gas more costly.
While Maine had its trouble with toxic releases to landfills, EPA’s Rascher was quick to note there were wins elsewhere.
“Maine did achieve successes with air emissions,” Rascher said. “So there was a small decrease in air emissions from last year” and “more than a 50 percent decrease in air emissions over the last 10 years.
“A 50 percent decrease … is a significant thing. And I think that’s a little bit of a good news story.”
Emmett Gartner covers accountability and Maine’s rural communities as a Roy W. Howard Fellow through the Scripps Howard Fund. Emmett earned his master’s degree in journalism from the University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism and a bachelor’s degree in environmental studies from the University of Vermont. While working as a reporter at the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism, he helped produce two award-winning investigations: “Printing Hate,” which documented the historic role of newspapers inciting racial lynchings, and “Mega Billions,” which investigated state lottery operations. Most recently, Emmett reported on health and environment for The Frederick News-Post in Maryland. He previously worked for the U.S. Forest Service in Oregon and interned for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on the Eastern Shore of Maryland.
TOPSFIELD, Maine — Jenna Stoddard is not sure where her son will spend his days when he starts preschool next fall.
Sending him to East Range II School would be convenient and continue a legacy. Stoddard lives just down the street and her husband graduated eighth grade there in 2007, one in a class of three. Topsfield’s population has dropped since then. The school now has five students, two teachers, few extracurricular activities and nobody trained to teach music, art, gym or health.
Stoddard’s son is too young for her to worry about that now. But the school may not be open by the time he is ready to go. Topsfield, a town of just 175 residents, will vote on whether to close the school on April 30. If it closes, the boy would likely be sent to preschool up to 30 minutes away in Princeton or Baileyville.
“That’s a pretty fair distance for a kid, a 4-year-old, who is now on a bus all by himself,” she said. “[If] school starts at [7:45 a.m.], what time is the bus picking 4-year-olds up here? And what time is he going to get home at?”
Topsfield is an extreme example of how an aging, shrinking population and rising property taxes are forcing Maine towns to make difficult choices about their community institutions. Just over a dozen people came to a Wednesday hearing on the idea of closing the school. The crowd was mostly in favor of it.
“It is emotional to close the school in a town,” Superintendent Amanda Belanger of the sprawling Eastern Maine Area School System said then. “But we do feel it’s in the best interest of the students in the town.”
Teacher Paula Johnson walked a reporter through the building, which is small by Maine standards but cavernous for its five students. It has four classrooms, a small library, and a gymnasium. There is also a cook and a custodian for the tiny school.
A hallway trophy case serves as a reminder of when the school was big enough to field basketball teams. Topsfield’s student population has never been large, but the school’s population has dropped dramatically over the past few years. It had 25 students in 2023, with many coming from nearby Vanceboro, which closed its own school in 2015.
As the student population dwindled, the cost of sending students to Topsfield climbed. With fewer students to defray the costs, Vanceboro officials realized they would be paying $23,000 per student by the last school year. So they opted to direct students to nearby Danforth, where tuition was only $11,000 per student.
East Range lost seven students from Vanceboro, bringing its enrollment below 10. Under Maine law, that means the district may offer students the option to go elsewhere. Parents of the remaining students in grades 5 through 8 took the option and sent their kids to Baileyville. This school began the year with eight students; three have since pulled out.
In Topsfield, Johnson teaches four of the remaining five, holding lessons for pre-K through second grade in one classroom. Another one down the short hallway is home base for the other teacher. She focuses on the school’s lone fourth grader and occasionally teaches one of Johnson’s first graders, who is learning at an advanced level.
The other teacher, who holds a special education certificate despite having no students with those needs, plans to leave at the end of the school year. If the school stays open, that will leave Johnson responsible for educating Topsfield’s youngest students, though the school will need to budget for a part-time special education teacher just in case.
After 11 years at the school, Johnson is not sure what she will do if voters shut it down.
“We’ll see what happens here,” she said.
Topsfield’s school board, which operates as a part of the Eastern Maine Area School System, is offering its residents a choice: continue funding the school only for students between preschool and second grade at an estimated cost of $434,000 next year or send all students elsewhere, which would cost less than $200,000.
At Wednesday’s hearing, the attendees leaned heavily toward the latter option. Deborah Mello said she moved from Rhode Island to Topsfield years ago to escape high taxes.
“It’s not feasible for the town of Topsfield,” she said. “We cannot afford it and it’s not like the children don’t have a school to go to.”
Others bemoaned the burden of legal requirements for the small district, including the need to provide special education teachers even if they don’t need one. Board members also mentioned that in 2028, the district will become responsible for educating 3-year-olds under a new state law. That adds another layer of uncertainty to future budgeting.
“It sounds like we’ve been burdened something severely by this program and that program by the Department of Education, to the point where a small school can’t even exist,” resident Alan Harriman said.
“And that’s been happening for a long time,” East Range board chair Peggy White responded.
Daniel O’Connor is a Report for America corps member who covers rural government as part of the partnership between the Bangor Daily News and The Maine Monitor, with additional support from BDN and Monitor readers.
BANGOR, Maine (WABI) – Good morning and Happy Sunday everyone. Skies are cloudy with fog across much of Maine this morning. Rain has entered locations along the interstate and to the northwest. Temperatures vary from the upper 30s to mid 40s. Winds are out of the SE between about 5-15 mph.
Today will be a wet and impactful day with rain and even snow anticipated as a large cold front passes through Maine. Skies will be cloudy with plenty of fog lasting through the morning. Rain will expand across the interstate by the late morning hours, reaching Downeast locations by midday/the early afternoon.
By the early to midafternoon, temperatures will start to drop across northwestern locations as the cold front passes through Maine. This will result in rain turning over to mixed precipitation and eventually snow across the Western Mountains, Moosehead region, and Northern Maine. Rain will continue steadily and at times heavily across the foothills, Interstate, Coast, and Downeast. A few thunderstorms are even possible closer to the coast.
Snow will expand across areas to the northwest of the interstate this evening, reaching all the way down to Interior Midcoast communities, the Bangor region, and Interior Downeast areas by sunset and into the start of the night. Precipitation will taper off across Western Maine shortly after sunset, before exiting the entire state around midnight tonight. High temps today will vary from the low 40s to low 50s with SSE to NW gusts reaching 20-25 mph.
Snowfall totals will vary under 2 inches across Western, Northern, and Interior Downeast locations. However, a few pockets of 2-4 inches are possible, mostly in higher elevations across the mountains. Rainfall totals will accumulate around a half inch to three quarters of an inch when all is said and done.
Precipitation will be out of Maine by midnight tonight, with cloudy conditions giving way to mostly clear skies by sunrise. Lows overnight will dip back below freezing across much of the state, from the low 20s to mid 30s tonight, so cover up any plants or flowers outside. WNW gusts will reach 20-25 mph. A Small Craft Advisory is expected offshore.
Skies will be partly to mostly sunny across the interstate and coast on Monday morning. However, by the late morning to midday hours, clouds will build with a few scattered rain and snow showers in spots. Conditions will remain on the cloudier side in the afternoon before clearing up around sunset into the start of Monday night. Highs will be chilly on Monday, from the low 30s to upper 40s. WNW to SW gusts will be a bit breezy, reaching 20-25 mph, which will add to the wind chill factor.
High pressure will build on Monday night, remaining overhead on Tuesday. Skies will be sunny in the morning, becoming partly to mostly sunny in the afternoon. Highs will remain cool, in the 40s across the board with North to SW gusts only reaching 15-20 mph.
A weaker low-pressure system could bring showers across Maine on Wednesday and Thursday. There is a bit of model uncertainty on exactly when it will impact Maine. The GFS has impacts on Wednesday, while the EURO, GRAF, and GDPS models have most of the impacts on Thursday. We will continue to monitor this system and potential impacts. All it looks to provide as of now are cloudier skies and rain showers, with some snow shower chances farther to the North.
By Friday and Saturday, conditions are trending on the drier side with sunshine and average temperatures returning to the forecast.
SUNDAY: Highs from low 40s to low 50s. Cloudy with AM fog. Rain becoming widespread throughout the day, turning over to snow to the north & west during PM. SSE to NW gusts reach 20-25 mph.
MONDAY: Highs from low 30s to upper 40s. Partly to mostly sunny early. Developing clouds with scattered rain/snow showers by midday/afternoon. WNW to SW gusts reach 20-25 mph.
TUESDAY: Highs throughout the 40s. Sunnier AM. Partly to mostly sunny PM. North to SW gusts reach 15-20 mph.
WEDNESDAY: Highs from low 40s to low 50s. Mostly cloudy with a few rain showers. Few AM snow showers possible North. SSE to SSW gusts reach 20-25 mph.
THURSDAY: Highs from mid 40s to mid 50s. Cloudier skies with rain showers possible. Some AM snow showers possible North. NW gusts reach 20-25 mph.
FRIDAY: Highs from upper 40s to mid 50s. Partly cloudy. NNW gusts reach 20 mph.
Copyright 2026 WABI. All rights reserved.
Editor’s note: This story was originally published in September 2022.
When it comes to Maine hiking, summiting Katahdin is the ultimate achievement.
Maine’s tallest mountain stands at 5,269 feet, and there are a number of different trails hikers can take to get up and down Katahdin. And while some are harder than others, none are easy.
But the views are incredible.
Whether it’s the rugged terrain of the Knife Edge or the vast landscape of the 200,000 acres that compose Baxter State Park below, here’s a look at what it’s like to climb Katahdin.
Hunt Trail
Abol Trail
Chimney Pond Trail
Cathedral Trail
Saddle Trail
Northwest Basin Trail
Knife Edge
Tablelands
South Peak
Hamlin Peak
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