Phoenix City Council signed off on terms for a 99-year ground lease and a 50-year waste supply agreement on Nov. 4, clearing the way for a long-delayed waste recovery campus that city staff say could extend the life of a regional landfill while giving hard-to-recycle materials a second life. The deal covers 33.9 acres in south Phoenix, with about 22 acres slated for actual development, and hands development and operating duties to a company called RIC PHX LLC.
The lease terms, first detailed by In Business Phoenix, place the leased parcel near 35th Avenue and Elwood Street. That location doesn't line up cleanly with how the City of Phoenix describes the broader Resource Innovation Campus elsewhere, placing it at 27th Avenue and Lower Buckeye Road next to the city's own transfer station. The available evidence doesn't clarify whether these are two different ways of describing the same footprint or something else entirely, so the discrepancy remains unresolved.
Whichever exact coordinates apply, the ambition behind the project is clear: a facility built to recover and reuse materials that typically end up buried, including hard-to-recycle plastics, lithium-ion batteries, electronics, textiles and construction debris. Once commercial operations begin, Phoenix will also make residential waste from its 27th Avenue Transfer Station available to the campus, though that arrangement is subject to existing contracts, per the same report.
A Years-Long Path to This Lease
This isn't a new idea for Phoenix. According to site documentation from C40 Reinventing Cities, City Council first approved development of the Resource Innovation Campus back in 2015, with a conceptual design submitted in 2017 and a master plan following in 2019 — neither of which was ever implemented. The city owns the site and had long intended to offer it through a long-term lease, with the same documentation describing a roughly 40-acre site against a competition that sought development of up to 20 acres.
City staff now expects the newly approved arrangement to reduce hauling and disposal costs and extend the life of the city's SR 85 Landfill, the report notes. That goal fits into a broader target: the C40 documentation lays out Phoenix's aim of diverting 50% of waste from landfills by 2030 and reaching zero waste by 2050, with the campus envisioned as a hub for circular-economy businesses and conversion technologies that turn waste into resources.
What's Changed in the New Terms
Notably, the updated agreement drops the pilot phase that had been envisioned back in 2024, moving straight into the longer-term lease and supply structure instead. Krause Interior Architecture's design for the site calls for a 90,000-square-foot building, according to the same reporting. As originally reported by ABC15 Arizona, the broader project traces back to a global design contest that Krause Interior Architecture won after the city sought ideas for a resource innovation headquarters campus.
Phoenix has circled this kind of material-recovery effort before. Back in 2019, city staff recommended Renew Phoenix, part of parent company Renewlogy, to operate a program recovering post-consumer No. 3-7 plastics, according to Resource Recycling. That proposed program was sized to process 6 million pounds of plastics annually, dwarfing the roughly 1 million pounds of mixed plastics the city's two existing material recovery facilities were capturing each year at the time.
For now, the Nov. 4 council action locks in the real estate and supply framework that had been missing for years, even as questions about the project's exact footprint, funding scale and construction timeline remain outside what's been publicly verified. What's confirmed is the structure itself: a 99-year ground lease, a 50-year waste supply commitment, and a company, RIC PHX LLC, now positioned to build and run whatever comes next on the site.
