Betty Poynter stops her mountain bike mid-ride near Sierra Vista, hops off, and starts collecting aluminum cans scattered along the trail. Later, she’ll drive these to a local drop-off point and other recyclables to a collection bin 30 miles away.
It’s a small act that reflects a much larger problem: Recycling programs don’t work for many small towns any more. Places like Sierra Vista and Patagonia had to give up their recycling programs entirely when China stopped its global recycling imports in 2018.
Local researchers think they have a solution. A hub-and-spoke recycling system that connects smaller rural towns (spokes) to a larger nearby facility (the hub) where recycling is collected, sorted and transported. They say this model could help small towns overcome the economic barriers that have left Arizona recycling at half the national rate.
The Arizona Board of Regents funded a $1.6 million research project to help smaller municipalities grow their recycling programs. The three-year effort produced statewide data models and practical strategies to make local programs more sustainable.
“One of the biggest problems we have in the waste management system across the entire country, including Arizona, is that municipalities and counties all operate independently. I live in Chandler, I work at [Arizona State University] in Tempe — two different sets of recycling standards,” said Rajesh Buch, one of the principal researchers of the grant project.
Buch is the business development director at ASU’s Walton Sustainability Solutions Service. His work focuses on reducing waste and improving how communities manage recycling across regions.
“We as a society don’t value the waste that we generate,” Buch said. “It’s just taken away by someone. It’s taken away by a private company or the city, and it magically gets recycled. Well, there’s nothing magic in it.”
This assortment of issues that make recycling what Buch calls a nationwide “broken system” have led Arizona’s recycling rate to fall to around 15%, he said, whereas the national average in 2018 was double that rate.
That means about 10 million of the 12 million tons of waste the state produces in one year ends up in a landfill.
Buch envisions multiple recycling hubs across the state. Pinetop, for example, could be a hub with rural towns like Strawberry, Payson and Springerville acting as spokes — bringing their recyclables to Pinetop for transportation to Phoenix, where the end market is.
It turns out that Pinetop is already acting as a hub for recyclers as far as New Mexico. Matt Patterson, the public works director at Pinetop-Lakeside, established a collection center six years ago to combat a pattern of illegal dumping following the end of Pinetop’s curbside recycling program.
The drop-off fee at the collection center is $3 for up to 50 gallons of recyclables, and those funds are used to transport the waste to Phoenix. Transportation — Patterson and several other experts have told Arizona Luminaria — is one of the most costly aspects of small-town recycling programs that has made some municipalities skeptical. The operation, which requires about $300,000 each year, has yet to make a profit but Patterson said, the local government just wants to be able to provide a service that’s good for everyone.
“I’ve been shocked at the amount of people that have actually shown up. We are hauling a significant amount of tonnage out of rural communities and a mountain town into the valley areas,” he said.
The average recycling rate in Pinetop was 43% from 2020 to 2023, according to data collected by Pinetop-Lakeside.
JB Shaw, the recycling coordinator at the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality, has collaborated with Pinetop and other towns like Bisbee and Sedona — which have all successfully diverted more waste from landfills. He has also been a key contact in Buch’s research at ASU for the past 12 years.
Shaw works mostly in education and outreach at the department of environmental quality, where some of his latest appearances are on “The Real Recyclers of Arizona,” a short-form “Real Housewives” spoof that Shaw and his colleagues created as informative and entertaining social media posts.
“We really feel most people want to do the right thing. They just don’t understand it all,” Shaw said.
As part of the project’s next steps, Shaw is consulting with more rural communities such as Kingman and the Hopi and Navajo Nations to help them apply for funding. Funding for recycling programs, Shaw said, typically comes from the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality’s Recycling Grant Program or the Recycling Partnership, a nonprofit that receives donor support and contributions from private corporations.
“The power is in the community”
Betty and Bob Poynter spend two hours each morning on their mountain bikes near their home in Sierra Vista.
“We’re biking along,” Bob says, and all of a sudden, “Where’s Betty?” he asks. “I wonder if she’s had an accident or something. No. She’s gotten off her bike and is picking up aluminum cans.”
For this couple who is, perhaps, Sierra Vista’s most enthusiastic recycling team, recycling is an opportunity to “connect the dots” between different community entities. Their ultimate mission is to make Sierra Vista a hub in a recycling model that includes both the private and public sectors. They’ve drawn up plans that would bring in contributions from private companies like Recyclops and Friedman Recycling Services, to organizations like the Arizona Worm Farm and Cochise College.
After Sierra Vista ended its curbside recycling program, Recyclops became the only recycling option for residents — unless you’re like the Poynters, who accumulate their recyclables and drop them every six weeks at Bisbee’s collection center about 30 miles away.
At the county transfer station in Bisbee, “you just pull your car up and drop off the recycling in the right bin, and they compress and bale it, stack it on pallets and load it on their truck,” Bob said. Bisbee then sends their loads to Friedman Recycling in Tucson or to México.
Bob and Betty are applying for a grant from the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality to help them carry out a feasibility study on their recycling, compressing and baling goals for Sierra Vista.
“The fun is just beginning!” Bob said.
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