Every year, we release a Year-in-Review featuring our high-level accomplishments as well as priorities for the year ahead. This is an important time and opportunity for us to take stock, learn from the experiences we had the previous year, and to continue to improve our programs, services, and operations.
While we engage with Salt Lakers mostly through recycling questions and efforts, we do so much more! Here are some highlights from 2024 and keep a lookout for more details in our 2024 Year-in-Review booklet coming soon. (Check out our full 2023 Year-in-Review booklet here!) Let’s take a moment to look back at what we’ve accomplished in just this year.
Top row, from left: Monica O’Malley (SLCgreen); Debbie Lyons (SLCgreen); Dan Milam (Information Management Services Department); Sophia Nicholas (SLCgreen). Bottom row, from left: Catherine Wyffels (SLCgreen) and Salvador Brown (SLCgreen). Missing: Jude Westwood and Brijette Williams.
We’re so excited to share the news that we received the Inaugural City Excellence for Human Rights Award! The Department of Sustainability (aka SLCgreen) received the award for creating and launching Clean Air SLC, an initiative to distribute equipment and information to help residents improve air quality in their neighborhoods and inside their homes. Staff focused on connecting to a diverse audience in outreach, with an emphasis on the City’s west side, and prioritized Spanish-language access. The spring landscaping equipment exchange resulted in an estimated 5,869 pounds of pollution being removed from our airshed.
We also launched the City’s first ever e-bike incentive pilot program in July 2024. We were able to fund 277 applications, equally dispersed across the seven City Council districts, to help people switch away from gas-powered vehicles for their short-distance commutes by lowering the upfront cost of an e-bike.
It almost goes without saying that improving air quality in Salt Lake City is a complex, multifaceted issue. There’s no single solution, but rather, a menu of solutions that each deserve their own consideration. Salt Lake City is committed to taking action in every way we can– with our internal operations and the creation of external policies and programs– to support improved air quality and reduce pollution across the community.
Want to learn more about local air quality issues and what Salt Lake City is doing to address them? Check out our air quality page. Read on to learn more about the 2024 Human Rights Day Celebration below and more amazing work happening for human rights in Salt Lake City.
The holiday season is upon us! This can be a time to gather with loved ones and enjoy some great food, often bringing recipes we only enjoy once or twice a year. Holidays can also be a great place to start when rethinking long-held traditions, habits, and how our actions can impact our community. Food waste is a major issue in the U.S. even outside of the holiday season. About 40% of all food produced in the U.S. never gets eaten, and this amount increases by an additional 25% between Thanksgiving and New Year’s!
However you celebrate, we encourage sustainable habits around gathering for the holidays, from food waste to decorations. And what better place to start than buying local food! Salt Lake City’s Winter Farmers’ Market returns on Saturdays beginning November 9th and will operate weekly from 10AM to 2PM through April 19th (closed November 30th and March 15th). SLCgreen’s summer intern Kate Kuwahara visited the Downtown Summer Farmers’ Market for the first time and shares her new perspective on farmer’s markets and learning more about our food systems.
Transportation is an important and necessary component of our day-to-day, but in the face of worsening air quality and the sustained effects of climate change, it’s a component we have to be increasingly conscious of. The question is no longer just about where we’re headed or when we get there, but how we choose to do so.
Clean Air SLC is an initiative that aims to distribute equipment and information to help Salt Lake City Residents improve air quality in their communities and inside their homes. We ran a small pilot E-bike Incentive Program in July of 2024 and we were able to fund 277 applications, equally dispersed across the seven City Council districts. Why did we focus on e-bikes? E-bike incentive programs work to help people switch away from gas-powered vehicles for their short-distance commute, such as running errands, meeting up with friends at a local coffee shop or bar, or even commuting to work if that’s an option.
Small but mighty, those short-distance commutes add up! A study conducted by the Bureau of Transportation Statistics found that over half of vehicle trips in the United States were three miles or less, while 60 percent of all vehicle trips were less than six miles. This represents a lot of potential to mitigate emissions plus health benefits and savings on car ownership and fuel costs.
Aerial photo of Pioneer Park in Downtown Salt Lake City.
Oct. 7, 2024
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Salt Lake City is celebrating Utah’s first-ever SITES- and Envision-certified projects following its recently updated Comprehensive Sustainability Policy. Glendale Regional Park, where work began last month, is on track to become the first SITES-certified project in the state and one of the largest park investments the City has ever undertaken. Salt Lake City Department of Public Utilities’ new water reclamation facility, which began construction in 2020, is the first Envision project registered in the state.
Enacted last December in alignment with Mayor Erin Mendenhall’s sustainability goals, the updated Sustainable Infrastructure policy added Envision and SITES to its approved certification pathways. The Envision framework is designed to help implement more sustainable, resilient, and equitable projects, while SITES supports nature-based landscapes that enhance biodiversity, mitigate climate change, and conserve resources. These two additional systems allow for a more diverse range of City projects to utilize sustainability frameworks.
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Salt Lake City Mayor Erin Mendenhall announced an innovative partnership with Solar Stewards to fund solar, air quality, and community resilience projects in historically underserved areas of Salt Lake City.
Salt Lake City is exchanging renewable energy certificates (known as RECs) produced on its solar array at the Sorenson Multicultural Center through a unique Social REC® model with Solar Stewards for financial contributions. Okta is the first identified buyer of Salt Lake City’s Social REC® via the Solar Stewards’ Marketplace.
“Salt Lake City is not only investing in solar energy to power our municipal operations and reduce pollution,” said Mayor Mendenhall, “we have also formed a unique partnership that will help us invest money from that solar back into the community.”
Salt Lake City is renowned for its recreation opportunities. With the Wasatch mountains right in our backyard, it is no surprise that many Salt Lakers, including myself, have an intense passion for outdoor recreation. Often those who love the outdoors already do their part in protecting it, like recycling and limiting single-use plastics, but when it comes to how we recreate, making sustainable choices may seem a bit more daunting. Check out these tips for making your outdoor adventures more sustainable.
Here at SLCgreen, we’re always working to find actionable, high-impact strategies to improve local air quality. This spring, we ran our first-ever Landscaping Equipment Exchange (in the past we’ve partnered with the State’s program). Our goal is to remove highly polluting gas-powered landscaping tools from the airshed and replace them with electric alternatives. Through this spring’s program, the City was able to:
♻ Recycle 707 pieces of gas-powered equipment.
⚡ Support the purchase of 1,324 electric landscaping tools.
🌏 Reduce annual air pollution by 5,869 pounds.
The Landscaping Equipment Exchange Program is part of Clean Air SLC – a new suite of air quality programs offered by the City to benefit Salt Lakers. It includes the landscaping exchange, the e-bike incentive program, and a forthcoming indoor air quality program – all meant to clear the air in our communities and homes.
Earlier this year, Salt Lake City Sustainability staff once again joined their counterparts of the 4 Corners Carbon Coalition (4CCC) to identify innovative carbon dioxide removal (CDR) projects to receive grant funding so that they can be replicated and scaled for greater impact in our region. In July, 4CCC announced four awardees that would be receiving $335,000 of funding for their liability biomass projects (read details in the press release below).
You might be wondering what CDR and liability biomass are. As 4CCC puts it, “carbon dioxide removal (CDR) describes diverse processes, on land and at sea, that take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, and durably lock it away in geological, biological and synthetic formations for decades, centuries, or even millennia.”
What is “in” this season? Refusing, reducing, and reusing plastics for a more sustainable summer.
So … What is Plastic-Free July?
Plastic-Free July is an initiative started by the Plastic Free Foundation, an organization founded by Rebecca Prince-Ruis that works towards the vision of a plastic free world. Since its beginning in 2011, the campaign has spread across the world, amassing an estimated 89 billion participants. Over the last five years, participants have collectively avoided 1.4 billion kilograms of plastic.
The movement has inspired global action from Hong Kong to the Philippines to Melbourne. Examples include plastic free hospitality initiatives, community engagement centered on reusable alternatives, and refilling stations for household cleaning supplies and personal-care products.
Now, you may be wondering: why are single-use plastics such an issue?
