No waste from other states has been a guiding principle of Maine’s trash laws since the late 1980s. It’s also misleading: Other states have sent hundreds of thousands of tons of construction waste to the state dump over the years.
Environmental activists, neighbors of the landfill including the Penobscot Nation and a growing group of lawmakers have decried the unique set of circumstances that allow private companies to dump so much material from Massachusetts into the state facility, despite laws that were once meant to prevent that.