Ginn started Hawk Ridge in 1989.\u00a0PFAS did not enter the scientific lexicon until the late 1990s. The chemicals were not widely known in Maine until reports emerged in 2019 about contamination at an Arundel dairy farm<\/a>. When Ginn\u2019s businesses started, the regulatory focus was on testing for heavy metals and organic chemicals.<\/p>\n A 2001 report<\/a>\u00a0by a citizens group\u00a0warned about hazardous chemicals in sludge and the dangers of waste spreading. <\/p>\n Some towns, including nearby Clinton, pushed back on sludge spreading around that time. Residents at a 1998 meeting questioned the state\u2019s licensing of two dairy farmers to accept sewage sludge on their fields. The opponents worried about foul odors, reduced property values and contamination of nearby strawberry fields.<\/p>\n \u201cSomething might pop up in 10, 15, 20 years \u2014 who knows how long,\u201d Gary Richards, a dairy farmer and selectboard candidate who opposed the use of sewage sludge, said in what turned out to be a prescient statement quoted in the BDN.<\/p>\n The Maine Department of Environmental Protection issued licenses for spreading sludge compost and for plants like Ginn\u2019s to produce it.\u00a0There were hundreds more like it across the country. Sludge is what remains after raw sewage is treated and the water is removed. It is rich in nitrogen, phosphorus, organic matter and other nutrients. <\/p>\n Farmers long saw it as a potent fertilizer. A Bangor horticulturist called composted wastewater sludge \u201cblack gold\u201d for vegetables and flowers in a 1988 BDN garden column. A Hawk Ridge official said in 2009 that its compost was \u201ccleaner than dirt.\u201d<\/p>\n In the late 1980s, the DEP required tests of incoming municipal sludge, the composting process, the finished product and various locations around Hawk Ridge. <\/p>\n They checked for chemicals including dioxin, a byproduct of bleaching paper pulp and burning waste that was linked to liver and reproductive damage, and metals including lead, chromium and mercury, according to a license granted then to Hawk Ridge. The regulator also required that the sludge not pollute any water or ambient air and not constitute a hazard to health.<\/p>\n Only after the 2019 revelation of PFAS in Arundel did Maine require expansive PFAS testing at compost facilities, at fields that had been spread with sludge and in private wells nearby. Sludge often includes PFAS that gets into the waste stream from industrial refuse and consumer products with water-resistant coatings.<\/p>\n Ginn said his goal was to create a general-purpose recycling company across New England. Early on, the facility sold compost and compost-blended products, bark mulch, erosion control mix and peat moss to customers including soil blenders, nurseries, landscapers and general contractors throughout the northeast.<\/p>\n One of the earliest graduates of College of the Atlantic, an environmentally focused college in Bar Harbor, Ginn is known for his campaign work for Maine\u2019s \u201cbottle bill<\/a>,\u201d which was passed by referendum in 1976\u00a0and upheld by voters three years later. Before setting up the composting facility, he was executive director at Maine Audubon<\/a>.<\/p>\n He formed the company Resource Conservation Services in 1983. At the beginning, his biggest clients were the wood-fired boilers that were generating electricity in northern New England. They produced wood ash that farmers used to lower their soil\u2019s acidity. That lucrative recycling business, which at its peak had 250 employees in four northeast states, led to looking for more products for the agricultural community.<\/p>\n Land application was a seasonal business because the product could not be spread on frozen fields. That\u2019s where Ginn got the idea to build a second business, a compost facility, which could accept sludge year round and produce and store a saleable product. Hundreds of composting facilities were being built all over the country in the late 1980s.<\/p>\n When Hawk Ridge, which was then a dairy farm in the unorganized territory of Unity Plantation, came up for sale, he jumped at the opportunity to buy it. The 60 acres of farmland were on two roads off of Route 139, Reynolds Road and Palmer Road, in an area that over the years has had fewer than 40 residents. <\/p>\n Ginn\u2019s primary market was the wastewater treatment plants in small towns nearby, which paid the company to take solid waste. He characterized the compost business as a low-tech one with a few buildings taking only in-state waste.<\/p>\n At the time, he didn\u2019t know about PFAS. There were no tests for it nor standards for whether there was any PFAS in any of the materials his companies handled. Under different owners, Hawk Ridge won accolades for its reuse of sewage sludge as compost, including from the federal government, the governor\u2019s office and industry awards as recently as 2021<\/a>\u00a0and 2024<\/a>. <\/p>\n \u201cThose of us who knew Bill Ginn thought of him as a serious conservationist,\u201d said Brownie Carson, who retired in 2010 after 26 years as executive director of the Natural Resources Council of Maine. \u201cFrom my perspective, if Bill had any inkling that there was this kind of problem, he never would have gone down that road.\u201d<\/p>\n Ginn named the facility after his sheep farm in Pownal, which was named on a 1987 letter\u00a0the DEP required him to send to abutting landowners as a condition of getting a permit. In it, he described his company and tried to reassure neighbors by noting his experience with treated sludge.<\/p>\n \u201cI have had my home farm \u2026 licensed for these materials for several years and have found them to be excellent sources of fertilizers and an environmentally sound method of farming,\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n Years later, high levels of PFAS were found on farms spread with sludge and at the compost operation. A 2023 state monitoring report found that water on one of the Palmer Road properties near Hawk Ridge measured 41,640 parts per trillion of a total of 15 types of PFAS, one of the highest levels in the state. Maine\u2019s upper limit for a total of six PFAS is 20 parts per trillion. The person living at that home did not respond when the BDN tried to interview them recently.<\/p>\n It\u2019s unclear when exactly the contamination began. Casella has noted that materials containing PFAS were spread on farmland in the area before the compost facility was set up. George Belmont, who has managed the facility for 29 years, said the ownership changes he has experienced allowed for more investment in the facility and put the onus on the chemical companies that created the \u201cforever chemicals.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe actions of chemical producers and manufacturers of products containing PFAS are devaluing the economic and environmental benefits that can be derived from [treated sludge], while also increasing the costs of managing them,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Experts on PFAS said the chemicals entered Maine\u2019s waste stream as far back as the 1970s<\/a>\u00a0through land application of sludge, but they went undetected for decades. PFAS has been used widely in consumer and industrial products since the 1950s. In the early 1960s a toxicologist at DuPont, a major manufacturer of PFAS, warned that the chemicals enlarged rat and rabbit livers, according to an Environmental Working Group<\/a>\u00a0report. A 3M manual from 1963 deemed PFAS toxic, EWG said. <\/p>\n The slowly unfolding story of PFAS toxicity follows earlier patterns of harmful substances, advocates said. Carson drew a parallel to the cigarette companies knowing for decades that smoke, tar and carcinogenic components were dangerous to humans, long before the public health community and regulators knew.<\/p>\n Ginn agreed, saying the real culprits are the chemical companies. He said they must have known much more about the persistence and impacts of their chemicals than they let their customers know, and yet they continued to market them. <\/p>\n \u201cWe end up now with the debacle that we have here in the state of Maine,\u201d Ginn said. \u201cWe have to hold them accountable.\u201d<\/p>\n Lori Valigra reports on the environment for the BDN\u2019s Maine Focus investigative team. Reach her at lvaligra@bangordailynews.com. Support for this reporting is provided by the Unity Foundation, the Broad Reach Foundation and donations by BDN readers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"UNITY PLANTATION, Maine \u2014 Conservationist Bill Ginn is mad about what happened at the heavily contaminated Hawk Ridge…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":324119,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47],"tags":[11718,192,7056,43433,8976,6394,79],"class_list":["post-324118","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-enterprise","tag-environment","tag-free","tag-new-perspective","tag-pfas","tag-polls","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/324118","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=324118"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/324118\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/324119"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=324118"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=324118"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=324118"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/BillGinnHawkRIdgeAT-600x621.jpg\")
Bill Ginn during a ski trip in January 2016. Ginn\u2019s former company, Resource Conservation Services, established the Hawk Ridge Composting Facility in Unity Township in 1990. It was later sold to a series of waste management companies, including Casella Waste Systems, the current owner that will shut it down in 2026. Credit: Courtesy of Bill Ginn<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/HawkRidgeWaterTruck9825.jpg\")
A water truck drives by a compost pile at the Hawk Ridge Compost Facility in Unity Township on Sept. 8, 2025. Credit: Lori Valigra \/ BDN<\/p>\n