AUBURN — A new solid waste and recycling plan presented to the City Council on Monday calls for several robust changes to the city’s curbside programs, including weekly recycling pickup and providing wheeled, lidded containers.

Prior to a unanimous vote to accept the plan Monday, Mayor Jeff Harmon said the list of recommendations from the Sustainability and Natural Resources board will be reviewed during an upcoming workshop, giving councilors time to read the report and consult with constituents.

The committee process to look at Auburn’s solid waste plan, approved by the council in January, came after the previous City Council ended Auburn’s curbside recycling program last year. The decision resulted in months of debate over recycling, a beleaguered drop-off-only system and a new-look curbside program implemented late last year.

The city’s current recycling program accepts certain plastics, cardboard and mixed paper, but does not accept glass and metals. The committee’s report said the city should again accept all recyclable materials, including glass and metals, to ready Auburn for the state’s rollout of the Extended Producer Responsibility Program.

Maine’s Extended Producer Responsibility program for packaging, approved in 2021, will require most producers of packaging to pay into a fund based on the amount and the recyclability of packaging associated with their products. According to the law, the funds will then be used to “reimburse municipalities for eligible recycling and waste management costs, make investments in recycling infrastructure, and help Maine citizens understand how to recycle.”

The committee’s report said that by recycling all items on Maine’s Extended Producer Responsibility list, Auburn can access new funding to offset collection and processing costs for household solid waste.

Ralph Harder, a member of the committee that issued the report, said the committee looked at Auburn’s current system of handling household trash, recycling and food scraps. The recommendations center on ways Auburn can reduce its waste stream and its costs through better recycling participation rates and additional ways to divert solid waste — like a more robust composting program.

Harder said the amount of trash generated per capita in Maine is rising while the level of diversion has remained flat. He said food waste represents roughly 35% of the weight in Auburn’s solid waste, meaning if that can be diverted through composting, the city’s tipping fees can be reduced dramatically.

The report said Auburn should expand its food waste drop-off sites while also partnering with the school department.

Other recommendations include adding a city staffer to oversee the solid waste programs, and public engagement to better educate residents and track results. The report also says the city should use the Extended Producer Responsibility process to investigate other possibilities, such as incentives to limit household trash. Incentives used in other communities include limiting the size of trash containers.

Councilor Adam Platz said waste reduction methods must be considered, to avoid “doing this every five years for the rest of our lives.”

“We can’t just subsidize throwing away all this waste,” he said.

Councilor Ben Weisner said he’s “very interested in the composting component.”

Before he was elected, Mayor Jeff Harmon campaigned on bringing back a more robust recycling program. When the Sustainability and Natural Resources board was tasked with conducting a comprehensive review of the city’s programs, he said it was “unfortunate and a mistake” for the prior council to stop curbside pickup, and that that new curbside program should only be a “stopgap measure.”

When the changes to the recycling program were made during the previous council’s term, officials said negotiations with contractor Casella centered on what materials are being recycled and used in secondary markets.

When briefly ending the recycling program in May of 2023, Auburn officials argued that it is cheaper to send material to Maine Waste to Energy in Auburn for incineration than to pay for a curbside program, where some materials end up incinerated anyway. Auburn has also historically experienced very low recycling rates.

However, Harder said Monday that the committee believes the rate is higher than the 7% that has been cited in the past.

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PORTLAND, Maine — The federal government issued on Monday the nation’s first floating offshore wind research lease to the state of Maine, comprising about 23 square miles (60 square kilometers) in federal waters.

The state requested the lease from the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management for a floating offshore wind research array with up to a dozen turbines capable of generating up to 144 megawatts of renewable energy in waters nearly 30 miles (48 kilometers) southeast of Portland, Maine.

The research array will use floating offshore wind platforms designed by the University of Maine and deployed by partner Diamond Offshore Wind. But construction is not likely for several years.

The research is key to growing the ocean wind energy industry in Maine.

Democratic Gov. Janet Mills signed a bill last year that aims to see Maine procure enough energy from offshore wind turbines to power about half its electric load by 2040, and the state has selected a site to build, stage and deploy the turbine equipment. In the next decade, University of Maine researchers envision turbine platforms floating in the ocean beyond the horizon, stretching more than 700 feet (210 meters) skyward and anchored with mooring lines.

“Clean energy from offshore wind offers an historic opportunity for Maine to create good-paying jobs, reduce our reliance on fossil fuels, and fight climate change by cutting greenhouse gas emissions,” Mills said.

The state requested the lease in 2021. The roughly 23 square miles (60 square kilometers) in the federal lease is larger than the state’s request of about 15 square miles (39 square kilometers). It will allow the state, the fishing community, oceanography experts and the offshore wind industry to thoroughly evaluate the compatibility of floating offshore wind.

Floating turbines are the only way some states can capture offshore wind energy on a large scale. In the U.S. alone, 2.8 terawatts of wind energy potential blows over ocean waters too deep for traditional turbines that affix to the ocean floor, according to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. That’s enough to power 350 million homes — more than double the number of existing homes in the U.S.

President Joe Biden has made offshore wind a key part of his plans for fighting climate change.

Since the start of his administration, the Department of the Interior has approved the nation’s first nine commercial scale offshore wind projects with a combined capacity of more than 13 gigawatts of clean energy — enough to power nearly 5 million homes.

(BDN) — Floating camps are popping up more and more in Maine’s lakes, ponds and rivers.

These floating structures aren’t houseboats, and many don’t have motors at all. They resemble camps that you would see on shore, except they float, and are anchored to the bottom or tied to something onshore. They come with decks, planter boxes and second stories or vaulted ceilings.

Cool, right? Well, not exactly.

The state says the floating camps are blocking the views from houses and camps onshore, posing pollution risks, and creating congestion at public docks and boat ramps. Some are even being used as seasonal rental properties.

Because they are not solidly onshore, these camps are beyond the reach of private property boundaries and shore regulations that protect the water and fishery from pollution. And because Maine doesn’t have a clear definition of what is a boat and what isn’t, there’s no consensus of what regulations apply to the structures.

That could soon change, because the topic is expected to come up in discussions in the Legislature’s upcoming session, according to Mark Latti, spokesperson for the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife.

Until regulations are in place, the number of these offshore camps will continue to grow. And unless they’re a private lake or pond, there’s not much Maine can do to stop them.

A group involving multiple state agencies recognized the severity of the problem more than two years ago. It submitted a report, including its recommendations, to the Legislative Committee on Agriculture, Conservation and Forestry in the spring 2023 session of the 131st Legislature.

“The group identified a need to define and regulate these non-water-dependent floating structures in order to protect Maine’s waters, and this will take a collaborative approach involving the public, the Legislature and various state agencies,” DIF&W Deputy Commissioner Tim Peabody said.

In practice, Maine generally allows anything that has a motor to be registered as a boat, even though the state has no universal definition for a recreational boat. Houseboats, which have been allowed legally on Maine’s inland waters for decades, have a fairly solid definition and depend on being on the water.

“Watercraft is defined throughout Maine statutes, and there are multiple definitions regarding watercraft depending on where it is found” in each agency, Latti said.

The reason for the loophole in the state’s laws and regulations mostly has to do with how authority over what happens on Maine waters is divided between multiple agencies.

The bottoms of lakes and ponds are under the jurisdiction of the Maine Bureau of Parks and Lands. The water and its quality is the Maine Department of Environmental Protection’s responsibility. The fish, wildlife and plants, plus boats on inland waters, are regulated by the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife. In unorganized territories, the Land Use Planning Commission has some say in what can be built where, but no authority for enforcement. If it’s in an intertidal region, the Maine Marine Patrol becomes involved. The Land Use Planning Commission and Maine Bureau of Parks and Lands both fall under the Maine Department of Agriculture, Conservation and Forestry.

Confused yet?

On top of that, towns bordering inland waters have a right to establish a harbormaster to enforce municipal mooring rules, but rely on the state to have clear regulations around watercraft. That gets the Maine Municipal Association and the Maine Harbormasters Association involved as well.

Some towns have established their own definitions of houseboats and floating camps. But they often have no capacity to address disputes over lake and pond usage and there may be multiple towns that surround one body of water, according to a state report.

Everyone has a stake in Maine’s lakes and ponds, but no one has the authority to remove a floating camp.

The challenge, the report submitted to the Legislative Committee on Agriculture, Conservation and Forestry said, is “the lack of a clear violation of law or regulation for the unauthorized placement” of floating camps. If there’s agreement that the floating camps should not be allowed, “a clear prohibition in statute would allow for enforcement of this prohibition.”

It has identified two possible directions for legislation it says would help.

The first, which is what the report recommends, would be to ban floating camps whose primary use is habitation, not navigation. It would require changing sections of other laws, rules and policies in multiple agencies to close loopholes. It would still allow true houseboats, which would have specific criteria to be met regarding structure, size, navigation and pollution control. This is thought to change what will and won’t be registered as a motorboat.

The second option would be to establish a new program within an existing agency to oversee a permitting and enforcement system that would regulate but not ban floating camps.

There is no current proposed legislation to the knowledge of the Maine departments of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife or Agriculture, Conservation and Forestry, according to their respective spokesmen.

The multi-agency report distinguishes between non-water dependent floating structures and water dependent. A non-water dependent structure would be a floating camp, because it could exist and be functional on land. Water-dependent would include boats and true houseboats.

That distinction, and whether the floating object is used primarily for human habitation or navigation, will be key in how definitions for boats, houseboats and floating camps are crafted.

DIF&W also proposes changes to the motorboat registration process that will define and set standards for legal houseboats to distinguish them from floating camps anchored in the water.

This change would make it harder for floating camps to be registered as boats, and for their owners to avoid DEP regulations that protect the environment around the shoreline.

It also proposes a clear definition of what can be registered as a boat and what cannot.