TUCSON, Arizona (AP) – Tucson’s Los Reales Landfill has a new name, but the change is only the first step in an effort to fully transform the facility into an environmentally conscious resource.
The Tucson City Council unanimously decided on July 7th to rename the landfill the “Los Reales Sustainability Campus” as the facility’s goal is not to generate waste.
The move supports the council’s climate emergency statement for 2020, which pledged Tucson to become a zero-waste city by 2050 and carbon neutral by 2030.
“We really tried to see the Los Reales landfill as a space for innovation and sustainability,” said Mayor Regina Romero. “To become a zero-waste city, we really have to rethink our landfill and look at it in a different way.”
Los Reales opened in 1967 and is Tucson’s only active landfill. The facility accepts around 2,300 tons of solid waste every day, and the city says it spends more than $ 8 million a year to process the waste here.
The facility’s new name goes hand in hand with plans to change the landscape while implementing sustainability programs to get as much waste as possible away from the landfill.
Over the past year, city officials investigated the implementation of Tucson’s climate resilience goals at the 5 square kilometer landfill. According to Carlos de la Torre, director of Tucson’s environmental and general services division, Los Reales was the ideal place to view waste as an asset rather than a liability.
“We are identifying a single asset that can be a model of what climate disintegration will look like,” he said. “We think Los Reales is an important part of that, and we can check many of those boxes with the facility we already own.”
While the plan is still in its infancy, the long-term goal is to redirect the waste cycle across the city so that it can be reused as production material rather than being buried in landfill.
But how does a landfill, a landfill for the city’s garbage, achieve the goal of not generating waste?
Of the waste that the city’s recycling program receives, only about 17% is actually recycled. De la Torre envisions a “multi-pronged” waste diversion strategy to increase this figure to 40%.
Initial ideas include composting food waste, filtering recyclable materials from the landfill, and sending plastic to a waste incinerator where the material is incinerated and converted into electricity or fuel.
Ultimately, some of the waste that ends up in the landfill cannot be reused. The term “zero waste” is more of a goal to strive for.
“Will it go to zero (waste)? Probably not, ”said de la Torre. “But we’re trying to cut the volume by 60 to 70% once we’ve exhausted all means to make sure we can find beneficial uses for these products before we land them.”
According to de la Torre, Los Reales still has about 70 years of capacity for the city’s rubbish. Part of the Sustainability Campus initiative, he says, is adding components for public use to “maximize the full extent of what could be out there”.
The preliminary concept for the sustainability campus includes 110 acres (44.5 hectares) to expand the landfill portion of the landfill and approximately 350 acres (142 hectares) for economic development and sustainability projects around the landfill.
City officials suggest building sports fields, paths and open common areas for educational centers and recycling boutiques.
“We usually wait until the landfills are closed before we use the landfill as open space,” said de la Torre. “We want to make sure we start now instead of waiting for the landfill to close.”
The aim is to transform the facility into an educational space where residents can learn what is happening to their rubbish and at the same time give discarded items a second chance to be used in last chance shops.
“We’re trying to change the way we think because if we don’t see them, we don’t understand them,” said de la Torre. “Once we have thrown this waste in the bin, we have to take responsibility for this waste for its entire lifespan. We have to think that whatever we generate doesn’t go away just because someone dragged it away. “
While making the landfill more accessible to the surrounding community, the redesign of Los Reales also includes many sustainability programs, including a tree nursery, a construction waste processing center, and a material recovery facility for sucking up recyclable materials from landfills.
However, there is a price tag on the wide range of programs proposed, although the exact cost has yet to be determined. De la Torre says the planning process will involve substantial input from the community, but ultimately most of the spending will be “generated from user fees.”
For example, local contractors who bring construction rubble to the facility are billed more for converting the material into a secondary use material than for dumping it in the landfill.
Sifting the city’s waste can also include the use of a “pollutant recovery system” or a sorting system that picks up all of the waste and sorts out the various types of material for reuse.
The city is currently commissioning Republic Services to sort recyclables. In the future, says de la Torre, residents will only be allowed to have one garbage can to dispose of their garbage, which will be sorted in Los Reales. The change would likely mean an increase in Tucson’s garbage disposal bills.
“We used to look at the bottom line in terms of the financial component. Now we need to take a macro view of how effective our operations are and what difference we can make, ”he said. “It requires investment, it requires a change in the way we do business today, and it tests the willingness of all of us as residents to cope with this change.”
At this point, the proposed methods of transforming Los Reales from a waste terminus to a place for sustainable reuse and public participation are just ideas. Public relations work and guidance from the mayor and council will move the plan forward.
City officials will return to the city council on August 10th to present a roadmap showing how the landfill’s zero waste target can be achieved. If approved, most projects would not begin until September through December, with the final zero waste plan expected to be completed within a year.
“It’s still very conceptual, but it’s a good starting point for setting many of these programs or strategies in motion,” said de la Torre. “This is going to be a paradigm shift in how we look at waste here in Tucson.”
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