Most of us do a lot of driving in our lives. We drive to school, work, to run errands, and to meet up with friends. Not only is all this driving time bad for our air quality, but so much time in our cars can also be bad for us. Studies have shown that long commute times can produce stress and fatigue, and hurt mental health.
So why drive alone when you can carpool?
Carpooling saves money, reduces pollution, and can transform a routine commute into valuable social time. Consider carpooling to work with a coworker who lives nearby or coordinating a carpool for your kids to get to school. Carpooling can also be a great way to get to events or out into nature with friends and family.
Walking is undoubtedly the most straightforward way to move around; humans have been doing it forever! Studies show that people are happiest and healthiest when they live in walkable communities. Walking is also beneficial to the environment and the economy. Despite these findings, in 2021 the average American commute reached an all-time high of 27.6 driving minutes each way. In the United States, only about 3-4% of commuters walk to work, which is sadly unsurprising based on the car-centric construction of many U.S. cities.
During the month of July, Salt Lake City is encouraging people to drive less in favor of walking, biking, and public transit as part of the Clear the Air Challenge. In 2022, this challenge was responsible for a reduction in over 53,000 trips and prevention of over 392 tons of CO2. This year, Salt Lake City employees and other residents will join teams and log their trips to compete and work towards a collective goal of saving 100,000 trips this year.
Brijette Williams, Sustainability Outreach Coordinator, lives in the suburbs but works and goes to school in Salt Lake City. She commutes by public transit as much as possible because it makes her travel time feel “valuable and productive.”
Instead of getting stuck in traffic on I-15, she can check emails, make lists for the day, or unwind without the stress of being behind the wheel.
Choosing to swap your car trip for a transit trip can help improve air quality and mitigate summer ozone. It’s also a great way to participate in this month’s Clear the Air Challenge, which encourages us all to take fewer single-occupancy car trips.
Here are some reasons to consider taking transit more often and tips to get started.
Public Lands Planner, Kira Johnson, rides her bike five miles to and from work daily. She started bike commuting out of necessity but quickly fell in love with it. She explains, “I didn’t have a car in college, but I had a bike. Thankfully, I had a friend in the same situation, and we got into bike commuting at the same time. We found a lot of childlike thrill doing it.” Several years later, when Kira got her first car, she found she still preferred to bike.
Bike commuting has a lot of great benefits. You stay more active, you interact with your community differently, and you can save a lot of money. Bike commuting is also a great way to reduce your emissions and air pollution impact, and to participate in this month’s Clear the Air Challenge.
It’s almost time for The Clear The Air Challenge—an annual event encouraging Utahns to reduce their vehicle emissions and help keep Utah’s air clean! The competition starts on July 1st and runs throughout the month, with a goal this year of eliminating 100,000 single-car trips and keeping 375 tons of CO2 out of the atmosphere.
One of the many ways Salt Lake City works to improve air quality is by making it easier to own an electric vehicle, which doesn’t emit any tailpipe pollution.
This will enable more residents to charge their vehicles at home if they live in a new multi-family building.
The electric vehicle readiness standards were adopted as part of the Off-Street Parking ordinance (21A.44) and will require multi-family new-construction properties to include electric vehicle ready (EV-ready) infrastructure at 20% of installed parking spaces. It does not require that the EV stations themselves be installed; only the electric capacity and conduit to make it that much easier to put in a station as demand increases.
We are officially well into 2023 and ready to share our full 2022 Year in Review with you! You might’ve caught our teasers on social media of what we’ve accomplished this past year but in case you missed it or want to read the full review, we’ve got you covered.
This past year we worked hard to provide sustainability in Salt Lake City, at both the city and local levels. Keep scrolling to catch a few highlights, and be sure to check out the full Year in Review for all the incredible work we did in 2022!
WASTE + RECYCLING
2022 Accomplishments
Emptied 4.3 million containers and provided weekly waste collection for approximately 42,000 residential customers.
Provide waste and recycling services for City parks and facilities, special events throughout the City, and curbside recycling for qualified small businesses and multi-family properties
Partnered with three local artists to create new wraps on our newest refuse trucks.
AIR QUALITY
2022 Accomplishments
Hosted an Indoor Air Quality Summit and launched a new public campaign to share best practices around keeping our homes, buildings, schools, and other spaces healthy.
Submitted a grant application for an EV car share pilot program at affordable housing properties
Expanded the City’s Comprehensive Sustainability Policy so that all new construction and major renovations of large City buildings will, when practicable, be constructed to use all-electric, combustion-free technologies.
A year-long effort to create solutions for Black-, Indigenous-, and People of Color- (BIPOC) owned businesses on the Westside of Salt Lake City to pursue rooftop solar and battery storage has received a significant boost thanks to a commitment from American Express.
American Express recently announced a $5 million global commitment to help cities build resiliency and fight climate change ahead of the United Nations Climate Change Conference which took place in Egypt last week. The Urban Sustainability Directors Network (USDN) has been awarded $1.2 million to work with three cities, including Salt Lake City, to install solar energy systems in our community.
American Express will provide $325,000 in philanthropic support to complement other incentives and financial strategies to help install solar with optional battery systems for small businesses on the Westside. These systems can lower energy costs for residents and businesses, can be more resilient than standard electric sources during extreme weather, support local clean energy jobs, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
View of the Utah State Capital Building from 500 North.
“I’m thrilled with American Express’ generosity, which will build off the hard work our City team and partners have done to advance solar on our Westside,” said Salt Lake City Mayor Erin Mendenhall. “We have the tools to reduce climate emissions, strengthen community resiliency, and save our businesses and residents money through clean energy, and this collaboration is a perfect demonstration of that.”
November 1 is the official start of inversion season along the Wasatch Front and it certainly feels like winter is settling in around us!
But what exactly is an inversion? This natural phenomenon occurs when a high-pressure system is setting up, trapping cold air on the valley floors with warmer air above it. This warm air also traps all our pollution with the cold air, keeping it contained in the valley until the inversion breaks.
What causes an inversion?
Meteorologists on the news and the Utah Division of Air Quality will warn you in advance before an inversion happens. Here are some signs that you can keep a look out for:
Calm winds: this reduces the natural mixing of air temperatures.
Clear skies: this increases the rate of cooling for air close to the ground.
Long nights allow the cooling of the ground to continue over a longer period of time, resulting in a greater decrease in temperature near the surface.
The sun is lower on the horizon during the winter, so it supplies less warmth to the earth’s surface and more to the atmosphere.
In Utah, our inversions often occur right after snowstorms due to the increase in cold air near the ground and the clear skies warming up the upper atmosphere and acting as a lid to the cooler air below.
Inversions are meteorological events that are common in mountain/valley geographies with our weather patterns. When you pair inversions with human activity, you often wind up with pollution that sticks around. Here along the Wasatch Front, a significant source of pollution comes from transportation(roughly 50%), as well as our homes and buildings (roughly 35%). That means each of us can make a difference to our air quality.
A trailblazing partnership of local governments will soon pool resources to fund carbon dioxide removal (CDR) projects in the Four Corners region. The 4 Corners Carbon Coalition (4CCC), established by Boulder County, Colorado and the City of Flagstaff, Arizona, today welcomed Salt Lake City, Utah and Santa Fe, New Mexico. Earlier this year, Boulder County and Flagstaff invested seed funding to launch this coalition with the goal of spurring regional CDR innovation to fight climate change. The coalition will provide catalytic funding to accelerate CDR project deployment and business development.
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. According to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), cutting emissions from fossil fuels is necessary, but it’s no longer sufficient to stem the worst effects of climate change.
“We’re so excited to round out the ‘Four Corners’ vision with two cities that recognize the importance of local leadership,” said Flagstaff Mayor Paul Deasy. “This collaboration gives local communities the opportunity to put our fingerprints on this emerging and necessary space of carbon dioxide removal (CDR); to hold ourselves and our partners to the highest standards; to show what community-based CDR might look like and the potential benefits of supporting vetted projects in our backyards.”
