Aluminum recycler drops Benson plant plan after fight over site near San Pedro River

Aluminum Dynamics, the company that had planned an aluminum recycling plant in Benson, has decided not to build it there. The firm says the facility will be developed at an "alternative location" and has blamed differences with some state officials for its change of course.

The proposal was highly contentious in the Cochise County city. The dispute led to the recall last month of half of the Benson City Council. Terri Jo Neff, who covers county politics, courts and crime for Herald/Review Media, discussed the development with KJZZ's The Show.

According to Neff, the company was leasing and planning to buy a 200-acre parcel, with about 20 acres set aside for the plant. The building would have stood 88 feet tall and been used to heat and melt scrap aluminum, mainly cans. The metal would then be cast into ingots or slabs weighing 2 to 4 tons each, loaded onto railroad cars and shipped to Mississippi, where it would be rolled into large aluminum sheets for sale to automakers, can companies and others.

Neff said the company first approached Benson business and city leaders around June or July of 2024, after an earlier plan in Gila Bend ran into trouble. It had bought land there without securing the needed zoning approvals. In Benson, it planned to lease the site from Union Pacific Railroad. Notices went out in October and November 2024, but Arizona's rules require notifying only nearby property owners over a very short distance, so no more than about 90 potential neighbors knew of the plan at that point. The city said little publicly while it waited to see whether the company would proceed.

Wider awareness came around May 2025, when residents and highway drivers saw groundwork being done on the desert site. Questions followed, along with learning about the environmental hazards of aluminum recycling and the large volumes of water it requires. The site sits next to the San Pedro River.

Neff said the controversy grew through 2025 and reached the courts by late 2025 and January 2026. Attorney General Kris Mayes held a town hall in Benson that Neff described as one of the biggest political gatherings the county has seen. Mayes later said in an interview that she was not opposed to the recycling plant itself and had suggested another location in Cochise County or elsewhere in Arizona, but was firmly against this site. By Neff's account, Mayes acknowledged threatening a public nuisance lawsuit against the company's owners, and the company concluded it needed to go elsewhere.

Neff said Aluminum Dynamics has applied for various permits in Mississippi, near its main plant, though the reaction of neighbors there is not yet known. She said she does not expect the company to try again in Arizona, even at the site about 20 miles from Benson that the attorney general suggested. The company says it still believes the economics support such a plant.

In Benson, Neff described widespread relief. Residents valued the prospect of well-paying jobs with full benefits, but objected to the environmental, health and water concerns and to what they saw as a lack of transparency. She said the opposition drew together conservative ranchers, environmentalists, neighbors and small business owners.

Attention is now turning to what comes next. Neff said the three new council members will face a short honeymoon, since the budget approved in recent days shows troubling signs for Benson over the next couple of years. Without a major industry, she said, difficult decisions lie ahead, and that prospect worries many residents nearly as much as the plant did.