Senator George J. Mitchell Center for Sustainability Solutions

Making a Match for Maine’s Manufacturing Waste

Article by Sonja Heyck-Merlin

A new matchmaking network seeks to connect Maine manufacturers around a simple premise: One company’s trash can be another’s treasure.

“Maine manufacturers are literally throwing away money. By that, I mean materials that go to a landfill or get hauled away at cost. But they often have real value to another company down the road,” said Zainab Jafri, a University of Maine master’s student working with the Materials Management Research Group (MMRG). 

The MMRG, launched in 2016, is a Mitchell Center-based interdisciplinary team developing solutions to reduce Maine’s solid waste. In 2025, MMRG members Cindy Isenhour, Reed Miller, and Jean MacRae — all UMaine professors — partnered with John Belding at UMaine’s Advanced Manufacturing Center. They were joined by the Maine Municipal Association, the Maine Resource Recovery Association, and the Maine Manufacturers Association. 

Together they received a Mitchell Center seed grant to develop a map of discarded manufacturing materials and build a picture of exchange opportunities across the state. Their goal is to connect manufacturers in a Maine Manufacturers Exchange Network (MEME). 

In order to build the map, the team is currently surveying manufacturers that generate non-hazardous industrial waste from their production process — lobster shells, fabric cut-offs, leather scraps, rope ends, metal shavings, and sheet metal scraps. The roughly 1,800 manufacturers in Maine producing these types of materials are diverse. Survey respondents to date represent the aerospace, healthcare diagnostics, metal fabrication, and textile industries.

The survey is designed to understand what types of usable waste materials manufacturers generate, including quantities and locations. MMRG also seeks to learn what resources one manufacturer might utilize that could potentially be replaced by safe and clean waste products from another. 

Then the matchmaking can begin. 

“The publicly available map will show where materials are generated as waste and where they’re needed. Then we can think about what pairings make the most sense from a transportation and hauling perspective,” said Isenhour, a professor of anthropology and Mitchell Center faculty fellow.

According to Isenhour, manufacturers are aware that their waste materials have potential value, but they might lack the time and resources to explore reuse opportunities. By uncovering these, the MMRG expects the exchange will benefit manufacturers’ bottom-lines by reducing waste disposal costs and generating revenue from materials they now pay to dispose of. 

Maine’s environment and communities also stand to benefit. Reed Miller, an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering said, “Maine has really pressing solid waste concerns. We have very few years left of landfill space, and any opportunity to mitigate the amount of waste will benefit the state overall. This can be a win-win situation where companies can save money, and the state can benefit by having less solid waste to manage while helping meet our climate goals.” 

Some Maine manufacturers are already finding creative reuse solutions. The goal of PalletOne, a mill in Livermore Falls, is to use 100% of every log. Any wood that is not used for pallets is utilized by other industries — bark for landscaping, wood chips for paper, firewood for home heating, and sawdust for animal bedding. Sea Bags, handcrafted in Portland, makes colorful bags from recycled sail cloth. Biddeford’s Sterling Rope sells their rope ends to two companies making dog leashes. 

The MMRG hopes to scale what these manufacturers are already doing, and the map is only the first step; its potential reaches further. Baseline data on manufacturer exchanges, could guide long-term economic development, helping new businesses identify where to locate based on available waste streams. If MMRG can demonstrate real monetary losses and potential savings, these numbers could make the case for the state of Maine to fund a dedicated commercial exchange platform.

And although this project is currently framed as a materials exchange, in the long run, the MMRG envisions strategically co-locating businesses where one can use the byproducts of another, called industrial symbiosis. There’s precedent for this strategy. Denmark’s Kalundborg Symbiosis is the world’s first and most renowned industrial ecosystem, where public and private partners exchange waste, water, and energy in a closed-loop system. 

MMRG invites anyone interested in this work to join MEME. This network, set to formally launch when the map is published, includes not only manufacturers but municipalities and other stakeholders interested in material exchanges and reducing solid waste. 

Isenhour believes that the motivation to reduce waste is universal. She said, “There’s not a single person that really enjoys wasting things. It feels bad for all of us, regardless of where you exist in the economy. Manufacturers are interested in reducing waste because they’ve spent money on resources that they feed into their productive processes. And when they see some of that money literally just being sent to the landfill or the incinerator, it’s good —from a profit perspective —to know that some of those materials could be reused.”