Greenwashing a dump?: Los Reales 'Sustainability Campus' turns 2 - TucsonSentinel.com

Greenwashing a dump?: Los Reales 'Sustainability Campus' turns 2

Tucson plans more changes at landfill, but is city really tackling trash problem?

- Daniel Shailer/TucsonSentinel.comTwo bulldozers compacting trash at the landfill at Los Reales.
- Daniel Shailer/TucsonSentinel.comTwo years since Los Reales became a sustainability campus, 'one change would be the sign at the entrance,' said Carlos de Torre.
- Daniel Shailer/TucsonSentinel.comCouncil Member Steve Kozachik in El Parque de San Cosmo on Wednesday, with an example ByFusion block made from compressed plastic trash.
- Daniel Shailer/TucsonSentinel.comA plastic collection site for ByFusion overflowing behind Kozachik's Ward 6 office.
- courtesy of Kevin GreeneTucson Environmental Services' first map for Los Reales Sustainability Campus from July 2021, including a Waste-to-energy plant in pink, numbered 4.
- Tucson Environmental and General Services DepartmentEGSD's most recent map, with over 200 acres of additional landfill (red) and seven 'economic development areas,' (blue) which include umbrella terms for Waste-to-energy plants.
- Tucson Environmental and General Services DepartmentEGSD's most recent map, with over 200 acres of additional landfill (red) and seven 'economic development areas,' (blue) which include umbrella terms for Waste-to-energy plants.

Two years ago, the city's new "sustainability campus" promised to get Tucson waste-free by 2050. What's changed since then? The old landfill has a new sign out front and plenty of plans, some of which local advocates call greenwashing.

For 11 hours a day, 362 days a year, bulldozers rumble over a mountain of dirt at Los Reales Landfill. Like children moving vegetables around a plate, the trash never seems to go anywhere; it just gets pushed around. There is no pit to push it into, because the bulldozers are already driving on top of the landfill.

“You are standing on trash,” said Louis Shadle, who started working at the landfill a year ago. “This used to be a big hole.’

Since Shadle started, he’s seen the 50-acre mountain of waste grow feet taller. Already the mountain has a commanding view up Interstate 10 back towards Tucson. Soon the bulldozers will move to a new 25-acre pit.

“Not much too it. Just trash and dirt,” he said.

Tucson has a trash problem. According to the latest Environmental Protection Agency statistics, the average American sends just over three pounds of waste to a landfill every day. So, by the numbers, the city’s only wholesale landfill, Los Reales, should see just more than 820 tons of trash daily.

The reality is almost two and a half times worse: more than 2,000 tons every day.

That doesn’t account for trash left around the city, much of which finds its way into the Santa Cruz watershed.

Tucson “is a trashy place,” said Luke Cole, who runs litter pick-ups with the Sonoran Institute. “I think we do have a particular trash problem.”

Tucson announced a climate emergency in September 2020. Part of its emergency response was a “Zero Waste Roadmap,” finalized this April and designed to completely fix Tucson’s waste problem by 2050. Along the way, the city also pledged to stop half of Tucson’s garbage going to the landfill by 2030.

To meet those goals, two years ago Los Reales was rebranded from the city’s only municipal landfill to its new “Sustainability Campus.” Now local advocates say some of the proposals for Los Reales – from simply making the landfill over 200 acres bigger, to a new processing plant converting plastic to energy – don’t do enough to address the root cause of Tucson’s waste.

Other initiatives, like capturing landfill gases and plastic downcycling, are taking too long.

Carlos De La Torre manages Los Reales as director of the city’s Environmental and General Services Department. In the two years since Los Reales became a sustainability campus, the biggest change, he said, “would be the sign at the entrance.”

Tucson Environmental Services has also built a tree nursery. A new road is under construction, and a “landscape buffer” — so that locals on the north side of the dump can’t see it — is “in design stages.”

“I think it’s going at the right pace,” De La Torre said. But will Tucson get to the zero-waste future promised? “We’re behind on that,” he admitted. “Yeah, we’re not as advanced as we should be.”

Waste to energy

Waste-to-Energy is an umbrella term for technologies which convert trash (mostly plastics) into power, or fuel. WTE tech exists on a spectrum of sophistication: from mass incinerating plastic and capturing the heat, to processes which assist the breakdown of trash with chemicals, or by removing oxygen from the burn.

WTE can also go by the euphemisms “chemical recycling,” waste “conversion,” and “source recovery” as well as under the ambiguous banner of “solid waste management.”

Tucson's Commission on Climate, Energy and Sustainability first met with a Singaporean WTE company in January 2021. When De La Torre announced the Sustainability Campus that June, he told the Arizona Daily Star that his department was considering a WTE plant at Los Reales, and the campus’ first concept map included a space for that plant, in pink.

A year later the city put out a Request for Information and received applications from a dozen WTE vendors, according to documents obtained from a public records request.

For some locals, that set off alarm bells. Kevin Greene worked for the EPA in Illinois for two decades before retiring to Tucson, where he volunteers with Sustainable Tucson, a local environmental advocacy group, as chair of their Zero Waste Working Group. WTE sounded too good to be true, so when Greene saw the plans he was concerned.

“Creating energy from waste sounds like a win-win,” he said. “But on closer look, it makes no sense whatsoever.”

Chemical recycling and WTE are “a dangerous false solution” to trash pollution, according to research from the Natural Resources Defense Council last year. Turning waste, particularly plastics, to energy, requires a large amount of fuel and generates toxic waste — from carcinogenic benzenes to tar, lead and a suite of volatile compounds. The fuel created is often considered “dirty,” creating higher exhaust emissions than diesel when burnt.

“There’s certainly distinctions between the different types of technologies,” Dr. Veena Singla, the paper’s lead author, told the Sentinel in an interview. “And there's consistencies across all of them as well.”

Some WTE plants can process all waste, for example, and others require plants which sort into different types. Those that claim to be zero-emissions, however, are bending the laws of physics, Singla said.

“It's just demonstrably false… any process where you're using heat or pressure or other chemical or physical forces to change material structure. There's going to be emissions, right?,” she said.

Tellingly, the NRDC’s research found that even those companies which claimed to operate without emissions applied for air pollution permits.

Shifting responsibility

Greene admitted that Sustainable Tucson are asking for broader cultural changes to the ways we create waste. One part of the solution was “outreach and education,” he said. The other is regulation.

“You’ve got to rethink this whole process and say, ‘wait a minute, who’s causing the problem? Well it’s, the brand companies!” he said. “They’re the ones who are pushing the single-use products, so you need to get them to the table to be involved in coming up with solutions.”

In the early 2010s, some Arizona towns and cities tried to force plastic producers to the table with regulatory changes. Bisbee, Tempe and Flagstaff considered and in some cases introduced local bans on plastic bags.

Singla agreed. “It’s not fair for the fossil fuel and plastics industry to put this on consumers,” she said. “Individuals shouldn’t be cleaning up their plastic pollution mess.”

But in 2015 the Arizona Legislature prohibited municipalities from creating their own regulations, with Republicans saying it was for the sake of consistency across the state. Flagstaff and Tempe dropped their bans immediately; Bisbee followed suit in 2017 under pressure from then-Attorney General Mark Bronovich.

More sweeping regulatory changes are in the works farther afield. Last June, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a law that required all of the state’s packaging to be recyclable and compostable within a decade. The Canadian government introduced a complete ban on all single-use plastic (except straws), phased in by 2030.

With a statewide law against banning plastic bags, Greene would like to see change higher up: across Arizona, or Tucson “at least supporting the legislation at a federal level that will shift responsibility.”

'Confusion and greenwashing'

The WTE plant has been removed from the most recent concept map for Los Reales. Instead there are two new “Economic Development Areas,” to include “solid/waste resource management companies,” a term which De La Torre admitted includes WTE.

“These are really to me greenwashing terms,” said Greene. “This whole process is suffering from a lack of transparency.”

In an initial interview De La Torre was adamant that his department was no longer considering WTE.

“I can tell you flat out – and I'll do it with the Bible; I'll do it with a lie detector – we're not pursuing that. Nobody from our department is pursuing that whatsoever,” he said.

According to a March report prepared by the city’s engineering consultants and obtained by a public records request, De La Torre’s department was still considering WTE. Sustainable Tucson also claim De La Torre and Councilman Kevin Dahl indicated their interest in WTE in a meeting that month. De La Torre remembers the meeting, but not any mention of WTE.

Dahl told the Sentinel that "I have not supported this at Los Reales."

Speaking last week, however, De La Torre corrected himself. “WTE has potential, it really has,” he said. “We’re not saying that the city will never consider that. I’m just speaking in terms of what we’re sharing today and I don’t see that as a short-term option.”

Short-term, according to De La Torre, is 1-10 years.

Greene isn’t convinced. “It seems like the department from the get-go has been so preoccupied with WTE,” he said. “They’ve spent three years looking at these options. That tells me that they’re laser focused: they want to do something around WTE.”

This isn’t the first time WTE has been suggested in Tucson. In 2006 the Department of Defense petitioned the city to build a plant on land it leased to Davis-Monthan Air Force Base. Then-City Manager Mike Hein denied the request, proposed for a site six miles east of Los Reales, because emissions would threaten “an environmentally sensitive community” and “residential, commercial, retail and recreational uses” in the area.

“Fast forward and we’re looking at the same kind of situation,” said Greene. In 2007, the Air Force decided to build a renewable energy site instead.

“What's baffling is that the city just adopted good climate action and adaption plans,” he said. “So I'm baffled as to why they would even be considering WTE technologies that are going to emit greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere.”

Feeding the beast/The root of the problem

The EPA’s “waste management hierarchy” looks like an inverted pyramid, and ranks strategies for dealing with trash from best to worst. Landfills are at the bottom. One rung up is energy recovery, including WTE and landfill gas recovery. The latter – capturing and cleaning the methane a landfill already gives off – is also planned for Los Reales; vendor interviews finished this week and a decision is expected by the end of summer, according to De La Torre.

Next up is recycling, then, at the top, creating less trash in the first place – the best solution of all.

According to Sustainable Tucson, the city isn’t interested enough in the top of the waste hierarchy, where some of the cheapest, cleanest solutions can be found.

“I think (WTE) is fair game,” said Greene. “It’s just that it’s almost like they’ve been focusing on this for so long that they’re not looking at all the opportunities for reducing, recycling and composting.

“Unfortunately I think they’re enamored with techno-fixes and big-box solutions. But the problem is these technologies come with environmental and economic drawbacks: they’re very expensive; they’re very energy intensive.”

Greene would rather see a renewed commitment to the city’s curbside recycling, which currently sees just over 10 percent participation across Tucson.

WTE contracts, on the other hand, typically commit the contracting city to keep producing and feeding a vendor trash for decades. For example, the vendor which briefed the city’s Commission on Climate, Energy and Sustainability in January 2021 would contractually require Tucson to supply it with 20 tons of trash every day for 20 years, according to one of the commission members attending the presentation.

“You create this lock-in of needing to generate waste to feed the WTE,” said Singla.

One of the vendors who applied, Covanta, currently operates a WTE plant in Honolulu, Hawaii. Because Honolulu couldn’t provide enough trash to feed the plant, they were forced to pay Covanta $6.2 million in penalties over three years.

Part of the issue is an inconsistent definition of “zero waste” in the first place, according to Greene. “We don't have a definition of zero waste in this community. We don't have a hierarchy.”

According to Sustainable Tucson, zero waste means cutting the waste we produce and reusing what we do make until at least 90 percent is diverted from landfills and incinerators.

De La Torre has a different definition. “Zero waste doesn't mean that we're not going to generate any waste,” he said. “All we're basically saying that zero waste means is that we'll find an alternative use instead of landfill.”

But more landfill is exactly what the most recent, unpublished-until-now concept map for the Sustainability Campus shows: over 200 acres more, across two potential new cells.

“They’re estimating another 80-100 years at the landfill,” said Shadle from the top of Los Reales, “and then who knows where we’re going after that.”

Shadle hadn’t heard that the city has pledged to be zero waste within the next 30 years.

“That would be nice,” he laughed. “I personally don’t like the idea of putting trash in the earth, but that’s just me.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly reported Councilman Dahl’s stance on WTE.

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