Plastic reuse program could become permanent in Tucson

One Tucson City Council member’s test run of a program to turn residents’ discarded plastic into construction-grade building material has seen significant buy-in, paving a potential path for a permanent plastic reuse program in the city.

In August, Councilman Steve Kozachik set up a large roll-off container behind his ward office in midtown Tucson for residents to drop off unrecyclable plastic that would have ended up in a landfill.

Instead, the plastic was sent to ByFusion, a California company that places plastic into a patented machine that uses steam and compression to churn out 22-pound blocks that fit together with interlocking pegs. Since the material is all superheated, ByFusion can take the discarded food packaging, plastic grocery bags and bubble wrap that standard recycling plants often can’t process.

When Kozachik first asked for residents’ plastic, he hoped to collect about 20 tons to test how a plastic reuse program could work. Instead, his ward office received more than 35 tons by the end of 2022, when the pilot program was set to end.

Now, the councilman is continuing to collect plastic at his ward office at 3202 E. First St. with hopes to iron out the logistics of making the program a permanent city service.

The City Council will discuss the ByFusion program at its Jan. 24 meeting, a conversation Kozachik hopes will lead to bringing ByFusion to Tucson to manufacture the blocks locally.

“This is really way beyond the scope of ‘Let’s just see if the community will buy into it.’ The community has totally bought into it,” Kozachik said, “My message to them has been, this is not going away. We are far too deep into this now.”

Bringing ByFusion to Tucson

While the company has collaborated with other municipalities throughout the country, ByFusion CEO Heidi Kujawa said Tucson’s pilot program has been “one of the first in this capacity,” and that “Tucson looks like they could be the first in the world,” to adopt the infrastructure to make the program an official city service.

The idea, according to Kujawa, “is solving the global plastic problem locally.” Area residents collect their plastic to be turned into construction material for local projects.

The plastic collected in Tucson is sent to local sustainable landscape company Tank’s Green Stuff for baling, shipped to ByFusion’s facility in Gardena, California, to be superheated and compressed into blocks, then shipped back to Tucson for local use.

The city yielded about 1,200 blocks from one trip to California carrying 20 tons of Tucson’s plastic waste. Those blocks have been used to construct four new benches at Himmel Park, while pre-ordered blocks were used for a trash enclosure at the Old Pueblo Community Center and to construct two benches in the San Gabriel neighborhood — the first ever ByFusion project in Arizona.

To avoid the environmental impacts of hauling the plastic to California, the remaining plastic is still in Tucson as the program’s future has yet to be decided by city officials.

Preliminary considerations are to bring ByFusion’s Blocker machine to Tucson and dedicate a facility to create the blocks for local construction. While Kujawa said it’s not certain what the cost of manufacturing a machine to bring to Tucson would be, it is “a sizable investment,” she said.

Kozachik said he has drafted a business proposal where the city would fund some of ByFusion’s start-up operations in the city with “clawback provisions.”

“We are actively looking for places to stand up a facility locally. The city is aware of that effort, and our commitment is to come there and replicate everything that we do in (California) in Tucson,” Kujawa said.

And expanding the program means one roll-off to collect the plastic in Ward 6 won’t meet the needs of a city-wide program.

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Plastic pick up

Kozachik says he has seen people from all corners of Pima County drive to his roll-off bin to dump their plastic. Continuing the program could come with expanded drop-off locations throughout the city — similar to its glass drop-off locations set up when Tucson decided to remove glass from its curbside recycling program.

Beyond creating more plastic drop-off sites, initial considerations are to create capacity for ByFusion to pick up the plastic itself. While the city currently picks up residents’ blue bins with all recyclable materials in them, Kozachik suggested “a multi-stream curbside pickup” where residents “put (their) plastic curbside and pay ByFusion to come and pick it up weekly.”

Kujawa said providing plastic pick up services is “exactly where we’re headed.”

“One of the reasons why we did the pilot is to just learn and understand how the community was going to react to a service like this,” she said. “Now that we’re armed with that information, it’s clear that we would have increased participation if we were to provide some extending services outside of drop-off locations.”

The plastic pick-up could happen beyond a residential scale, too. The pilot program’s plastic yield has gained the attention of businesses who have contributed masses of plastic waste from their operations. Plant nurseries, car washes and pool supply companies have all called Kozachik’s office to inquire about the program.

Poly Print, a food packaging company that produces a variety of plastic products from the labels on single-use water bottles to bags for pet food, produces 100,000 pounds of plastic waste a month. Now, several hundred pounds of that waste have been diverted to the ByFusion program.

“We’ve tried other companies for recycling for years, and they couldn’t take it because of glue or adhesive, and ByFusion was like the perfect opportunity. They don’t care what’s on it,” said Wendy Pawlak, the administrative and regulatory assistant at Poly Print.

Kozachik has been sending trucks to the business to pick up its unrecyclable plastic, an arrangement Pawlak said “is just a great opportunity for us to give something back to the Tucson community as well as the planet as a whole.”

The cost

The city still has to figure out, and mayor and council have to discuss at their Jan. 24 meeting, the cost of providing such a service, which was one purpose of conducting a test-run of the program.

The city’s Environmental and General Services Department empties the roll-off behind the ward office about three to four times a week, Kozachik said, at a cost of about $110 per trip, or $6,600 total for about 60 trips.

Kozachik has paid Tank’s Green Stuff about $1,200 from his ward budget to bale the plastic, while ByFusion has absorbed the costs of hauling the plastic out to California, turning it into blocks, and shipping them back to Tucson.

Plus, the city already has a recycling partner through a contract with the Republic Services Material Recover Facility. Kozachik has previously said the company is reluctant to use a ByFusion machine that could siphon plastics away from its own revenue stream.

Carlos De La Torre, director of Tucson’s Environmental and General Services Department, said placing the machine at the Republic Services facility would require “significant amendments to our contract with them.”

But the machine could be placed at another facility outside of the realm of the city’s waste and recycling services provider.

“Right now, we’ve got all the puzzle pieces laying on the table; we just need to put them together. And they will fit,” Kozachik said.

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