Latin Recycling Sisters Turn Scrap Into Power and Neighborhood Education

In southern Arizona, two Mexican American sisters run a family recycling company born when the work was dismissed as hauling trash. Now, Recyco processes up to 6,000 tons a year while turning community programs into a quiet borderland civic project.

A Yard Where Kids Once Played and Checks Still Matter

In the same place where they once ran around after school, the sisters now run the day. The air carries that dry industrial smell of dust and metal, and the yard has its own rhythm: the clatter of aluminum, the heavier thud of steel, the pause as a load gets weighed. It is not glamorous work. It is constant work. And it sits inside a long argument about what labor counts, and who gets believed when they say they run the place.

Recyco was founded more than four decades ago by its parents, Marco and Olga Gallego, immigrants from Sonora, Mexico, who built the company after years of industry experience, illustrating resilience and community roots.

“We are a family business, established and operated by women,” Vanessa Gallego Luján told EFE, challenging stereotypes and inspiring respect among the audience.

Their father, they explain, built contacts on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border to sustain the company, while their mother ran the day-to-day operations. In their telling, this was not a marketing narrative. It was the actual system that kept the doors open. “My mother was and still is our pillar, our motivation, and a role model,” Gallego Luján told EFE. You can hear the family history in that phrasing, as well as the sense of apprenticeship: the business was the classroom, and their mother was the teacher.

From Dismissed Work to an Essential Industry

Over time, the company grew into an operation that processes between 5,000 and 6,000 tons of materials and metals, including aluminum, copper, and steel, across two sites in Tucson. They also acquire unused appliances, keeping bulky items from ending up in the municipal landfill. The scale matters, but so does the way the sisters talk about it. They do not describe a shiny transformation. They describe persistence and a slow cultural shift in which a job once dismissed as dirty is recognized as infrastructure.

Even now, old expectations show up at the counter. “There are still people who ask, ‘Where is the boss?’ or ‘Where is the owner?’ and they are surprised to see that we are two women who own the company,” Bélgica Macías, an administrator and owner of Recyco, told EFE. The surprise is the point. What this does is expose a reflex that stretches beyond one industry: authority is expected to arrive in a certain voice, a certain posture, a certain gender. When it does not, people act as if the enterprise is missing its final signature.

For Macías and Gallego Luján, taking over was not strange. They grew up there. Macías remembers playing and running around after school. At the same time, her mother worked, a detail that lands as both tender and practical because it implies how closely family life and labor were braided. She also remembers paying people who brought recyclable material when she was very young, and receiving her first check at that same site because her mother insisted they learn to manage their own finances. It is an everyday observation with a sharp edge: in many families, children learn money as a source of anxiety; here, it was taught as a tool.

Now Macías runs the plant’s administration while Gallego Luján strengthens community ties, making the yard a source of local pride and belonging.

Teaching Recycling as a Family Language

Recyco participates in educational programs in local schools to encourage a recycling culture, and the sisters frame the lesson in a way that feels true to family dynamics. “Many times it is the children who educate the parents,” Gallego Luján told EFE. It is a simple line, but it captures something real: habits do not move only downward from adults to kids; they move sideways and upward too, especially in communities where schools serve as a bridge for information that households did not grow up with.

They also collaborate in community events such as Earth Day and Children’s Day, and work with the zoo and other businesses to prevent thousands of tons of material from ending up in the municipal landfill. Their approach blends business logic with neighborhood logic, the idea that the community is not separate from the customer base but made of it. Macías argues that being women gives them the sensitivity to support the community, and their examples stay grounded in specific lives rather than slogans. They speak proudly of a woman who started by recycling small quantities of cans and now receives close to $1,000 per visit, a change that has allowed her to become economically independent. They also point to a man experiencing homelessness who was offered a job after he committed to staying clean for three months, a small conditional promise that turned into stability.

Recyco remains a family business where uncles, cousins, and friends work alongside them, focused not only on increasing recycling but also on educating the Latino community about the environmental and economic benefits of the practice. Their work has been recognized by Tucson Mayor Regina Romero and Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs, a nod from formal power to a business that has spent decades doing the unglamorous labor that keeps a city functioning. The memorable line here is not a slogan so much as a reality check: in border country, dignity is often built in places that smell like metal and dust, long before it is applauded in public.

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