Tucson recycling facility offers tours

A huge conveyor belt moves at about 225 feet per minute to haul tons — 3,100 of them last month from Tucson alone — of recycling materials up into the air to various parts of Waste Management's Tucson Recycling Facility, where 34 people along the way pick out what can't be recycled and sort what's left into chutes and onto belts that carry the items to specific areas and drop them into giant piles.

Plastic bottles end up with plastic bottles. Cardboard ends up with cardboard. Cans end up with cans.

Now school kids, Scouts and even grown-ups can visit the facility to learn about recycling in Tucson.

Waste Management has renovated the administrative offices at its Tucson Recycling Facility, into a tour area with interactive activities and live video streaming of the recycling as it happens just outside the office walls.

People on the tours won't be able to go through the recycling area itself for safety reasons.

Opening the building for tours and educational presentations is part of Waste Management's plan to triple by the year 2020 the amount of recycling it handles at the center, said Carrie Galvan, Waste Management's area director of recycling operations.

The space is set up to handle groups of about 10 people at a time. It features a robot named "Cycler" who can answer children's recycling questions via a remote-controlled microphone, a kiosk with interactive computer games, a large flat-screen TV simultaneously showing four parts of the recycling area in action, a wall of recycling statistics and an area where kids can play recycling games such as holding certain items and figuring out whether they recycle and how long they take to break down in a landfill.

Don Gibson, recycling coordinator for Tucson's environmental services department, said recycling increases as more children learn about it.

They go home and tell their parents what they've learned, he said, and parents begin to follow their children's suggestions.

Tucson's first neighborhood recycling centers were on Tucson Unified School District property, Gibson said.