Recycling in Rural Arizona
The only nationally recognized day dedicated to promoting and celebrating recycling in the United States, America Recycles Day, held on and around November 15, educates and encourages individuals on:
how to be more mindful of what they consume
where and how to properly recycle
the #BeRecycled pledge to actively choose to live a recycled lifestyle in their everyday lives.
While it's always a good time to learn about recycling, moving that knowledge to action for many rural communities is a challenge. J.B. Shaw, Arizona Department of Environmental Quality's recycling coordinator, chatted with Local First Arizona about the hub-and-spoke model as an attainable recycling solution for #RuralAz.
What is a hub-and-spoke recycling model? How does it work?
It’s a regional approach where communities work together to create a more sustainable recycling program. Spokes are usually smaller communities with simple drop-off locations and are much farther away from the market. Hubs tend to be larger communities with established recycling infrastructure. Materials are collected at the spokes and brought to the hub where they are sorted, baled and sold to various end markets – the processing industries that turn them into reusable supplies. The hubs carry the operating cost to process the recycling, offsetting some of these costs by selling the recyclables to market. The spokes do not share in the revenue of the recyclable sales, but reduce their own costs of landfilling the material that instead gets recycled. The best part is each regional hub-and-spoke model can be designed to suit the needs of each region.
What are the potential economic and environmental benefits of this recycling model?
The environmental benefits include conserving natural resources and energy as well as preventing pollution by reducing the need to mine or refine more raw materials. Economically, hub-and-spoke recycling has been shown to grow jobs in both collection of materials and processing the materials to be used in the manufacturing industry. Our goal would be to attract processing and manufacturing businesses to Arizona to further localize the use of materials collected in the recycling program. Regions could set up programs to help incubate and accelerate businesses in the recycling sector.
Arizona State University is also working on an idea called a micro-factory. This is a smaller operation that processes plastics (water/soda bottles, milk cartons, etc.) into plastic flake, which is then used in manufacturing new products.
Many rural communities may not see how the initial and ongoing funding for a recycling program is feasible for them. What insights would you offer on that?
First and foremost, recycling is not free. Funding is necessary to have a resilient recycling model. This can take the form of fees, grants and even cost avoidance. Some communities charge residents $2 per 55-gallon bag of recyclables dropped off at their transfer station. This, along with the sale of recyclable materials, helps the hubs’ programs to break even. Spokes would be encouraged to offer the same fee structure to help pay for someone to monitor the local recycling drop-off site and for tipping fees to the hub to help cover costs of processing materials and transporting to end markets. It's important to remember that you don't need to offer drop-off access 24/7, 365 days a year. Spoke communities can start with a one-day-a-week or month drop-off location schedule and then add in more days over time. All the materials that spoke communities divert from the landfill will save money by avoiding landfill tipping fees.
How can rural communities, from policymakers to business owners and residents, get involved with your recycling efforts?
The first step is to reach out to me (see J.B.’s contact information below). I can set up a time with your region to come out and provide the initial training on hub-and-spoke recycling and help answer questions. The training is intended for all groups within a region, including city/town leadership, public works, economic development, local organizations, local businesses and others important to have at the table. Remember, this will be your pride and joy, so invite anyone to this initial training that could have a stake in your success. Once a region decides they are interested in pursuing the hub-and-spoke recycling model, we can arrange the next meeting to go over the current state of recycling in the region to identify potential hubs and spokes and begin identifying scenarios that could work for your region.
J.B. Shaw
Recycling Coordinator
602-771-5613
shaw.joseph@azdeq.gov
What do you hope this project accomplishes for rural Arizona?
Our initial goal is to find regions in Arizona that are interested in pursuing hub-and-spoke recycling for their communities and then work with them to figure out the best way to implement the program. Our hope is that this leads to further funding to build out financial models for all regions in Arizona, as well as to begin looking at developing local end uses for recycled materials. This would further cut down on transportation while building an economy around recycling that will create more jobs for the region. The end result we would like to see is a circular economy for paper products, plastics, glass and metals. Other items can be added down the road as a region feels necessary.
J.B. Shaw was a panelist at the 2022 Rural Policy Forum. For more information, see his slides on this recycling model.