The town council of Bar Harbor, Maine, has voted to back a regional plan that would result in the construction of a waste-to-biofuels anaerobic digestion plant to be operated by Fiberight LLC, Catonsville, Maryland.

According to an online report by the Mount Desert Islander, the 7-0 Bar Harbor town council vote backs the construction of the plant in nearby Hampden, Maine, with Bar Harbor becoming the second city to sign a 15-year agreement to divert trash to the facility if it is built.

“We are steadily gaining support, and anticipate having sufficient tonnage committed by the end of March [2016] to satisfy financing requirements,” Craig Stuart-Paul, CEO of Fiberight LLC, tells the Recycling Today Media Group.

Bar Harbor is part of a group of more than 185 Maine communities that currently send their municipal solid waste (MSW) to the Penobscot Energy Recovery Co. (PERC) waste-to-energy plant in Orrington, Maine.

According to the Islander news report, a consultant hired by the Maine communities involved in the project visited Fiberight’s facility in Lawrenceville, Virginia, to “see it and smell it” because he “didn’t want someone selling us a concept,” according to the consultant as quoted in the article.

Stuart-Paul indicated at the Bar Harbor town council meeting that Fiberight’s proposed facility is not technically a “waste-to-energy” operation, in part because “the EPA qualifies anaerobic digesting as organics recycling.” He also said recycling is a large part of the planned operation, “including a ‘second pass’ through incoming solid waste for any recyclable material not diverted at the source,” according to the Islander article.

In order for the facility to be operational in early 2018 as planned, the project’s backers say they must receive commitments totaling 150,000 tons of MSW by June of this 2016. Bar Harbor on its own generates just 6,000 tons of MSW annually, according to the news report.