Rick Wilson had been running a small recycling operation for over a decade at the back of Mesquite Elementary School, in Casa Grande. Now it's one of the few places where city residents can dispose of their plastic, tin and aluminum.

Casa Grande was one of many cities that about four years ago fully suspended or dramatically reduced their recycling services. Some continued to offer a drop-off alternative, while others retired their recycling containers.

Wilson, a 5th grade teacher, went from running a solo operation collecting three pounds of waste a day to processing about 70 pounds a day with the help of 10 volunteers. He is likely getting recyclables from fewer than 800 people, he said, and it’s already demanding.

“My job gets in the way,” Wilson said, joking. “My concern is, if it gets too busy and my volunteers retire, I'm dead in the water because I could not keep up. It's just too much work.”

Many communities in Arizona lack recycling services. A big factor in the decline of programs was that most recycled waste was being purchased by China, and when the country banned imports on foreign recyclable waste in 2018, the prices dropped. It affected recycling profitability throughout the country.

In areas outside of Phoenix and Tucson, recycling was already challenging for a number of reasons: population size and distance from metropolitan areas that complicate program's finances, a lack of local buyers for the recycled material, and scarce funding. The Arizona Legislature has not appropriated funds for the recycling program in over a decade.

Rajesh Buch, a senior global futures scientist at Arizona State University, and Richard Rushford, an assistant research professor at Northern Arizona University, are leading a statewide assessment to find solutions to municipal recycling in Arizona.

The team will estimate the amount and type of recyclable waste dumped throughout Arizona, the economic impact that recycling could have, and the cost-benefit of operating recycling programs depending on communities’ size and finances. The data will be available to the public online and allow users to get information on cities’ recycling policies all in one site.

The need to find recycling hubs

About 30 out of 450 cities and towns in Arizona offer some sort of recycling service.

Most communities in the state, 361 of them, are unincorporated. They don’t have a local government and are supported only by county services. Most places lack not only curbside pickup but drop-off locations too, so valuable waste can only go to the landfill, despite residents’ best intentions.

“The best way that (recycling) can work for most of rural Arizona is a hub-and-spoke type system, where one community acts as a hub for six or seven communities to all collect all their recyclables,” said Buch.

Buch also serves as the circular economy practice lead and business development director for ASU’s Rob and Melani Walton Sustainability Solutions Service. He believes even small-scale recycling processing could attract new business and markets into Arizona with the right planning. The team is running several models to draw those scenarios out.

Buch and Rushford are estimating the amount of recyclable waste produced in Arizona’s 15 counties. The waste stream is divided into 12 major categories: fiber (paper and cardboard), plastic, glass, metal, yard waste, food, textiles, other organics, wood, construction waste, household hazardous waste and electronic waste.

With that baseline they can also calculate what would be the potential job creation and tax revenue.

The research will also provide a much needed information platform for the general public. ADEQ has a list of recycling programs by city, but it's not complete or updated. There is no requirement on either recycling nor on data collection in Arizona.

"The landscape of (recycling throughout Arizona) is very fragmented," Rushford said. Standardization, access and consistency are the biggest challenges.

Data from the research could also help identify hot spots for recycling depending on the material. So far, the team has identified 10-15 potential cluster sites for recycling.

In turn, the models and recycling scenarios give an insight to both cities and investors.

“If you're an investor you want every piece of information that you can get. The information is cumulative," said Kenneth Polasko, chief research and technology commercialization officer with the Arizona Board of Regents.

"That increases your probability that there is a potential investment."

The Board of Regents, the governing body of Arizona's public university system, provides sales-tax funded grants to projects focused on solving state issues, such as the municipal recycling research.

The purpose of the funds is to address things that affect Arizonans, Polasko said. Recycling is close to most people, who see it as a basic, environmentally friendly action that they support.

Is that glass jar really recyclable?It depends on where you live and how clean it is

The wider economic benefits

Researchers want to find out not only whether recycling programs are financially viable, but how they could boost local and state economies.

“If you have more businesses operating in recycling, they'll require more businesses to provide them with trucks and recycling facilities and so on,” said Timothy James.