Ashlyn Bloom traded Tucson for the quiet life in Benson — ranch chores and walks outside. Now she’s using TikTok to sound the alarm about an aluminum recycling plant in the first stages of construction nearby, a project she says could threaten the town’s way of life and the San Pedro River that runs through it.
“Our small town is in danger,” says Bloom, who has been posting videos about the project since the summer. A nonprofit she started with other Benson residents has filed suit this fall against the city in an effort to stop the project.
“Not only is this being placed in a low-income rural town where a lot of us use our land to provide for ourselves, but it’s also going right along the San Pedro River, which is the last free-flowing river in the southwest.”
The proposal from the Mississippi-based metal manufacturing company Aluminum Dynamics is to build and operate a facility to process aluminum from scrap into recycled aluminum, which involves melting and casting the metal, for an out-of-state mill.
Benson’s planning department voted in favor of a permit for the height of the project’s building on Nov. 6, 2024.
Bloom’s opposition, and that of several hundred other people in the region who have spoken about their concerns in public forums, on petitions, in comments on possible regulation of the project, and in Facebook groups, did not stop Benson’s planning department from approving the project.
But their concerns about the impact on local wildlife and water flow, and on communities’ ability to farm on their land, could open up another avenue of relief: a nuisance lawsuit.
That’s the tool Arizona’s top lawyer is considering to help weigh the impacts of an aluminum plant. Attorney general Kris Mayes held a town hall in Benson on a weekday evening in October attended by hundreds of people, the vast majority of whom were opposed to the project.
“I’m here because I want to understand the issue here in the community, but I am also here because it is my job to enforce the law,” said Mayes during her Oct. 9 public forum in Benson. “We do have public nuisance laws in Arizona, and I have applied it in other situations in rural Arizona where we had corporations threatening to do harm to their surrounding neighborhoods and communities.”
Mayes’ office sued Fondomonte Arizona in 2024 for an operation in La Paz County that she argues is using so much groundwater to grow alfalfa for export to Saudi Arabia that it has become a nuisance for local communities.
One thing the debate over the aluminum smelter makes clear is that it’s not enough for community members to be opposed to the development.
“It’s obvious that people in the community feel like they’ve been let down by the process,” Mayes said. “There are real questions: we’re sitting in a school right now that’s less than half a mile away from the location of this thing. It’s on the banks of the San Pedro River. It’s right across from a nursing home.”
Echoes to Project Blue
Outraged residents in Benson and Tucson have raised concerns about how local officials introduced proposed developments to the public, and want more voice in the process for approving energy and water-intensive industries moving into their communities.
The Benson complaints have key echoes to the ongoing experience of the Tucson area with the Project Blue data center.
At the core of Benson residents’ concerns about the aluminum plant are the environmental impacts.
Facilities that melt and reshape aluminum release a byproduct of the process called perfluorocarbons, or PFCs, into the air. PFCs have been connected to asthma in children and arthritis in women, and can remain in the environment for long periods of time.
In the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality’s July 2025 fact sheet on the requested permit, the agency says the facility “has the potential to emit hydrogen chloride, a regulated hazardous air pollutant, in excess of the major source threshold.”
There is also concern over water use.
Dan Breuner, who came out to Mayes’ town hall in Benson, said he lives about a mile from the plant location. He and his family left their home in Northern California to retire in Arizona. They brought warnings, he said, of the ways that over-pumping groundwater in the central agricultural part of the state had caused land to sink.
“If my well goes dry, my land is useless,” said Breuner. “I just hate to see water used so flippantly.”
Kathy Lara, a longtime Benson resident and the former social media manager for the city of Benson’s visitor center, also came out to Mayes’ meeting to oppose the plant. She sees her two sons wanting a future with clean energy and a clean environment, and she says she wants that as well. In her view, Benson’s city council is a barrier. “Why are we allowing seven people… to create these long-lasting effects?”
Benson’s mayor, vice mayor and city council members did not respond to a request for comment. City manager Greg Volker said he was not able to comment on Arizona Luminaria’s requests because the city is involved in litigation related to the aluminum plant.
Still, even as opposition to the aluminum plant in Benson is large, it isn’t absolute.
Hoyt Johnson, a former community development manager for the city of Benson, said he was open to the plan if it could be run in an environmentally clean way because Benson needed the development dollars.
“All those things that people usually are frustrated with: why don’t we pave any of our roads? Why don’t we have more of this or that? Well, having more business in our community helps do that,” he said. “I don’t want my wife or my kids or grandkids or dogs breathing toxic chemicals. Absolutely not. But if the plant can be clean and can work that way, it’s great.”
Organizing means being in it for the long haul
Bloom’s mom was the first to start the Facebook group opposing the aluminum project, but Bloom decided to get on TikTok because as a member of Gen Z, she knew that’s where many of her peers would be.
“I started making TikToks and Instagram posts to bring it to my generation’s awareness,” said Bloom, whose bio on the app calls her “Walmart Erin Brokovich,” in reference to the environmental activist played by Julia Roberts in a 2000 film.
In the weeks since that first effort, Bloom has helped start a nonprofit called Health Over Wealth Benson explicitly to fight the aluminum plant. The group sued the city of Benson in September arguing it didn’t follow proper permitting procedures for the plant.
She is buoyed, in particular, by the failure of Aluminum Dynamic’s efforts last year to open an aluminum plant in Gila Bend; the proposal was voted down by the Gila Bend Town Council.
For both Benson and Pima County, the next step happens at the state level.
Aluminum Dynamics is now waiting for the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality to review its air quality permit.
Similarly, in Pima County the data center’s developer, Beale Infrastructure, said in September it is moving forward with Project Blue, this time promising a greener proposal that will use new low-water air-cooling technology, but is still waiting for state regulators to hear a special agreement request with Tucson Electric Power to supply energy.
And like in Project Blue, some of the people fighting the aluminum plant in Benson don’t want it in the desert at all.
“People keep calling us NIMBYs,” said Bloom, referring to an acronym that stands for Not In My Backyard and is used to pejoratively refer to people who are against certain types of housing developments. “At first, yeah, maybe I don’t want this in my backyard but now after seeing the level of pollution it would cause and the desert, it doesn’t belong in Arizona, point blank, period.”
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