Whew! What a year. We knew going into 2025 that people felt discouraged and worried about climate action with a new federal administration. But have hope! Because there is meaningful, sustained action taking place right here — action we could not have accomplished without your support.
You showed up for our Climate Plan survey, supported renewable energy options for Salt Lakers, recycled tons of material (9 million tons, actually) and exchanged a lot of gas-powered yard care equipment for electric instead. All this will keep adding up to solutions for a healthy, sustainable future.
Visit our website to check out our 2025 recap and the exciting work we’ve got on deck for 2026.
By SLCgreen intern Wiley Speckman and staff Jude Westwood
Thinking about a new car? Gas feels familiar and reliable, but if you care about climate change and air quality you may want to consider an electric vehicle (EV) instead. Here’s what you need to know.
Salt Lake City invites residents to help shape its climate action plan, “Climate Forward SLC”
Sept. 15, 2025
While climate change is a global crisis, many impacts are being tackled on local, community levels. Salt Lake City has been a leader in Utah, first committing to climate action in 2002 with the Kyoto Protocol. Since then, the City has achieved a lot, but much has also changed and evolved.
To refresh critical future steps, Salt Lake City Mayor Erin Mendenhall and the City’s Sustainability Department recently launched Climate Forward SLC, a process to update the City’s climate strategy.
The New American Goat Club was a 2023, 2024, and 2025 community organization recipient. Photo credit: Ashley Detrick/Salt Lake City Mayor’s Office
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June 26, 2025
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Salt Lake City continues to increase residents’ access to fresh, healthy, affordable, and culturally relevant food by funding 12 community food projects through the Sustainability Department’s 2025 SLC Food Microgrant program.
This year, over $56,500 in funding was granted to community-led projects aligned with recommendations from the City’s Resident Food Equity Advisors Program.
“We often talk about building a more resilient Salt Lake City, and this is one way we’re doing it—by supporting neighbors and community groups who grow food, share knowledge, and improve access to locally sourced, culturally meaningful foods,” said Mayor Mendenhall. “These microgrants are small investments with big returns for our health, our environment, and our connection to one another.”
Help Us Celebrate National Waste & Recycling Workers Week!
June 16-24th marks this year’s Waste and Recycling Workers Week! These essential workers keep Salt Lake City clean and sustainable, rain or shine (even through the pandemic, earthquake, and wind storm!) every weekday of the year except for Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s Day.
Our Waste & Recycling Division does some of the most time-sensitive, important work in the entire city! There’s all kinds of things you probably didn’t know about this crucial City division, such as:
Salt Lake City services more than 42,000 households, emptying garbage, recycling and compost bins every week.
Each daily collection driver empties between 600 to 900 bins — about 20,000 pounds — of waste, compost, or recycling EVERY DAY! Can you imagine what the city would look like if they weren’t on the job?
Next time you’re at an event like the Pride parade or the Utah Arts Festival (happening this weekend by the way!), please think about our team’s hard work to keep those events clean and running smoothly — and give them a thanks if you see them! 👋🏽 In 2024, Salt Lake City Waste & Recycling serviced more than 4,000 garbage and recycling containers used at 105 special events!
We’re excited to introduce ourIndoor Air Quality Program, designed to help you create a healthier home environment. In this blog series, we’ll share tips, resources, and program updates to help you improve the air quality in your home.
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.
As 2022 comes to a close, we want to give you an update on the exciting and important work that’s been happening with our goals and the program this year.
We’ve been steadily developing the governance structure and outlines of the program since it became established in state statute after the passage of HB 411 in 2019. You can learn more about the beginnings of this program and our carbon goals here.
This year we celebrated a total of 18 communities moving forward as of the July 2022 participation deadline. (There will still be another vote—likely in late 2023—by each participating community’s council to decide whether to participate in the final program once it’s approved by the Public Service Commission.)
The 18 communities form what’s called the Community Renewable Energy Agency, the interlocal government cooperative working to design this Program.
And, together, we can have a big impact on renewable energy development in the state and region! Collectively our communities represent about 25% of the electricity that Rocky Mountain Power sells in Utah.
The Program will bring new renewable energy resources to serve Salt Lake City and participating communities, so that by 2030, the amount of electricity we use annually will be matched by renewable generation.
This means the Community Renewable Energy Program has the potential to source 25% of the electricity the utility sells in Utah from renewable energy!
This is important because climate scientists agree that in order to avert the worst impacts of climate change on our health, ecosystems, economies, and societies, global emissions must be halved by 2030 and reach net zero by 2050.
Developing and implementing the Community Renewable Energy Program is one of leading strategies that Salt Lake City and other participating communities are taking to #ActOnClimate in line with these science-backed targets.
This policy was originally put in place in 2017 to cover a wide range of practices affecting Salt Lake City Corporation’s internal operations, standards, and protocols across seven different policies.
Each policy addresses the rules, regulations, and sustainable practices that must be considered and/or implemented while executing City operations that fall within one of the seven following categories: air quality and climate change, chemical reduction, materials management, petroleum storage tanks, property acquisition or sale, sustainable procurement, and water.
For example, the policy includes things as far-ranging as reducing paper waste and minimizing the use of plastic water bottles, to setting the standard when it comes to how we construct or remodel our municipal buildings.
We are practicing what we preach when it comes to sustainability!
The City’s Comprehensive Sustainability Policy was already significant in requiring that new construction or major renovation projects of City buildings over 10,000 square feet be evaluated for Net Zero Energy and be built to achieve at least LEED Gold. Salt Lake City’s Net Zero Public Safety Building and two Net Zero fire stations (FS 14 and FS 3) were constructed with these high environmental standards.
In 2022, at the urging of Mayor Mendenhall, we took the policy even further to require the evaluation of all-electric provisions for major new construction or renovation.
Earlier this month, Salt Lake City Mayor Erin Mendenhall and the Sustainability Department held an Indoor Air Quality Summit, bringing together city officials, academic researchers, building managers, and interested organizations to discuss the current status of indoor air quality, as well as possible initiatives and solutions that could be taken to help create a healthier environment both inside and out.
Speakers included Salt Lake City Mayor Erin Mendenhall; Daniel Mendoza, Research Assistant Professor at the University of Utah; and Nicholas Rice, the Corporate Industrial Hygiene Manager at Intermountain Health, with SLCgreen’s own Peter Nelson hosting.
While outdoor air pollution is a recurring topic in Salt Lake City discussions, indoor air pollution has become more significant as the correlation between outdoor and indoor air quality are researched. In her opening remarks, Mayor Mendenhall explains, “We know that buildings and homes are a critical space for indoor and outdoor air quality because our buildings produce a significant portion of the air we breathe outside.”
