Tag Archives: recycling

Help Us Celebrate National Waste & Recycling Workers Week!

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!
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Our 2024 Year-in-Review Highlights

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.

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How to Recreate More Sustainably  

By SLCgreen Intern Kailee Sendle

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.  

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Landscaping Equipment Exchange Spring 2024 Program Outcomes

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.  

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Happy Plastic Free July!

By SLCgreen Intern Kate Kuwahara

“Plastic Free July” by Alachua County CC BY 2.0  

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?

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2023 Year-in-Review Highlights

By SLCgreen

Every year, we release a Year-in-Review with featuring our high-level accomplishments as well as priorities for the year ahead. (Check out our full 2023 Year in Review booklet here!)

It’s also 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 2023 and keep a lookout for more details in our Year-in-Review booklet coming soon. (In the meantime, you can take a look at previous annual reports for 2022 and 2021.) Some notable achievements include:

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Friendly Fall Reminders From Your Waste and Recycling Team 

By SLCgreen Intern Iris Tang

With fall in full swing, we wanted to share some seasonal reminders as we head into November. 

Leaves and Other Yard Waste 

Did you know a lot of your fall waste can be composted? Leaves, dead branches, clippings, and other green waste are all compostable! Composting where you can is a great way to divert waste from the landfill and lower emissions. Salt Lake City’s brown bins are for compost and their contents are processed at our city’s own compost facility. The facility processes the waste and recycles it into woodchips and compost, which are then available for purchase at the Salt Lake Valley Landfill. If you have questions on whether something is compostable, visit this link. 

If you find that your brown bins are filling up, you can request additional temporary bins (at no additional cost) here or by calling 801-535-6999. 

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Please Recycle! A Comic by Max Barnewitz

Image shows a cartoon racoon saying "Recycling isn't a myth! But it is complicated!"

Recycling can be confusing. Whew—we know. Have you ever thought it could be explained in a more engaging way?  

We’re excited to share with you a special comic on recycling from one of our SLCgreen alums. 

Max Barnewitz worked as SLCgreen’s Community Outreach Coordinator for several years before going on to earn their MFA in Comics at the California College of the Arts in 2023. In a recent project, Max found a through line between those two worlds, creating a comic explaining recycling in a fun, approachable way. (After all, who doesn’t want to hear about trash from a cute cartoon trash-panda?)   

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Mayor Mendenhall Answers Your Questions on Air Quality in SLC

This week, Mayor Mendenhall and SLCgreen hosted an “AMA” or Ask Me Anything on Instagram and Twitter, taking your air quality questions.  

Salt Lake City continues to lead communities in the state when it comes to air quality policies and programs – both with our internal operations, as well as community-facing efforts.   

Still, we collectively have much work to do. Air pollution will not disappear overnight in a valley growing as ours is and faced with the challenges of our geography and climate.  The good news is that, according to the Utah Department of Air Quality, per capita pollution has decreased over the last decade, even as our population along the Wasatch Front boomed. There are also technologies available now that can drastically reduce the manmade emissions in our valley over the coming years, and historic funding opportunities to help us adopt them. Paired with solid urban planning and transportation design, we’re hopeful for the future when it comes to air quality, and that comes from working every day to realize solutions. 

So what causes our poor air quality? And what is the City doing?  

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