Arizona landfill to become a zero waste ‘sustainability campus’

The Los Reales Landfill in Tucson, Arizona, will dawn a new name in an effort to completely restructure the facility into an environmentally conscious resource, reports the Arizona Daily Star.

Tucson City Council voted unanimously to rename the landfill to “Los Reales Sustainability Campus” as the facility takes on the goal of achieving zero waste.

The move supports the climate emergency declaration the city council adopted in September 2020, which committed Tucson to become a zero-waste city by 2050 and reach carbon neutrality by 2030.

“We have been really trying to look at the Los Reales Landfill as a space for innovation and sustainability,” Mayor Regina Romero told the Daily Star. “In order to become a zero waste city, we really have to reimagine and think about our landfill in a different way.”

Los Reales opened in 1967 and is Tucson’s only active landfill. The facility takes in about 2,300 tons of solid waste daily and the city spends roughly $8 million every year to process waste at the site.

The facility’s new name comes with plans to change its landscape while implementing sustainability programs to divert as much waste as possible away from the landfill.

For the past year, city officials have been looking into implementing Tucson’s climate resiliency goals within the 1,200-acre landfill. According to Carlos de la Torre, director of Tucson’s environmental and general service department, Los Reales was the ideal place to begin looking at waste as an asset instead of a liability.

Los Reales has about 70 years left of capacity for the city’s waste, according to de la Torre. Part of the sustainability campus initiative, he says, is to add public use components to “maximize the full extent of what could be out there.”

The preliminary concept for the sustainability campus includes 110 acres to expand the dumping portion of the landfill and about 350 acres for economic development and sustainability projects around the perimeter of the landfill.

“Typically, we wait until landfills are closed before we start using the landfill as an open space,” de la Torre told the Daily Star. “We want to make sure that we start doing that now, rather than to wait until the landfill is closed.”

The goal is to turn the facility into an educational space where residents can learn about what happens to their trash while being able to give discarded items a second chance for use at last-chance stores.

While making the landfill more accessible to its surrounding community, the revamp of Los Reales also includes many sustainability programs including a tree nursery, a processing center for construction debris and a material recovery facility to siphon off recyclables from waste dumps.