LEWISTON — Casella Solid Waste would like to expand its local recycling facility, doubling the number of employees and taking recyclables from New Hampshire, Vermont and Quebec.

Casella Regional Manager Dan Emerson presented the company’s plan to city councilors at Tuesday’s workshop meeting.

If councilors approve, Casella would extend its current hours of 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. to 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., add a second shift and hire an additional 30 employees.

The addition would let the company bring recycled material from northern New England to Lewiston for processing, allowing the company’s Boston facility to take more waste from southern New England.

“We think it’s best as a company to use an underutilized facility like Lewiston,” Emerson said.

Casella’s 15,000-square-foot, automated recycling center south of the city’s landfill on River Road is designed to process unsorted recyclables, handling between 20,000 and 30,000 tons per year. It opened in 2014, replacing Lewiston’s old recycling operation.

The company pays the city rent for the facility, as well as property taxes.

The current contract with Casella does not allow any recycling in Lewiston from outside Maine. City Administrator Ed Barrett said the contract was written to settle concerns about Lewiston becoming a dumping ground for New England trash.

“We went through a great, lengthy process to get this facility in place to begin with and it involved significant time, lots of comments and it resulted in one of the longest contracts I’ve ever been involved in for a relatively simple facility,” Barrett said.

Barrett said about eight of every 100 pounds of material sent to Casella’s Lewiston facility can’t be recycled and is sent to Auburn’s Mid-Maine Waste Action Corp. incinerator and eventually dumped in Lewiston. That recycling residue amounts to about one pound of ash, Barrett said.

“If you look at it another way, this is very similar to a manufacturing operation,” Barrett said. “They bring in raw materials from outside, it’s processed, a product is shipped out and a side product has to go, in this case to the incinerator.”

Councilors were open to the general idea but had questions and some objections. Councilor Mike Lachance said he might accept waste coming in from New Hampshire, but would never agree to let it come in from Quebec.

“For some people, it’s bad enough that we are bringing in waste — mostly recyclable — from outside of Lewiston,” Lachance said. “That reaches a new level when we start accepting it from out-of-state and it reaches an even greater level when we become the international dumpster, so to speak.”

Other councilors had questions about a proposed change that would allow the Lewiston facility to take recyclables from elsewhere in case a Casella operation had a catastrophic failure.

Barrett said he would bring answers to councilors at another workshop.

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