So you think your individual sustainable choices won’t really have an impact on climate change? Actually, research shows they do.

According to Robert Frank, author of “Putting Peer Pressure to Work” (2020), our voluntary environmental actions are significant for two reasons. First, they have the power to shift how the people around us behave. People who see you using reusable shopping bags may consider doing the same. Park visitors who are using throw-away plastic drink bottles may see you filling your water bottle and decide to purchase one and do the same. 

Second, and perhaps more importantly, our sustainable choices change who we are, making us much more likely to vote greener and to support large-scale programs and policies needed to slow climate change. 

Here are some more highly visible green choices you can make, model and have conversations about. 

• Make sure you recycle well and help others do the same at the curb and the recycling center. Keep in mind that recycling errors can contaminate large amounts of otherwise recyclable material.  
• Walk and cycle to travel around your community; doing so on popular trails, especially those along roads, may inspire drivers to ditch their cars and do the same.  
• Participate in community clean-ups in a group or by yourself. Removing litter helps keep stormwater clean. Others may notice how nice trash-free roadsides look and participate.  And, never again chuck their stuff out the window.  
• Participate in activities, attend events, and join organizations that advocate for climate change practices and policies. Go public by wearing their clothing and using their swag.
• Keep up with information about our climate crisis. Make some sustainable choices and get passionate! 

Recycle Utah, your community nonprofit drop-off recycling center, provides these weekly tips. Visit their website for more information — www.recycleutah.org.

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There are lots of easy ways to make your Halloween green this year. The holiday is often marked by plastic-fibered, cheaply produced costumes, masks and decorations that are made in highly polluting overseas factories and shipped to big box stores. Americans spend billions of dollars on this stuff. And after a year or two? Many of us throw it in the trash.

Instead, donate your used costumes or use pieces to re-costume. Check out thrift shops and swap costumes with friends for “new” costumes. Create costumes from recyclables. Sew up some custom outfits or rent something “spooktacular.”  

“Trick or treat!” Halloween’s #1 fun-filled activity is about collecting individual plastic-wrapped sweets in plastic bags or pails. Instead, use small recyclable or reusable bags and consider how many sweets you want your children and you to eat. Leftovers? Don’t throw them away — drop the sweets off at Recycle Utah for a staff treat!  

Pumpkins galore! Often trucked to us from faraway commercial farms. We carve them into Halloween faces. Fun! Most end up in landfills, where, like all food waste, they produce methane gas. Instead, pick out locally grown pumpkins, gourds, and corn stalks. Use pumpkin flesh for baking; seeds for roasting a tasty snack. Leftover pieces are nutritious food for animals such as squirrels and deer. Compost pumpkins, gourds, and corn stalks. 

To make the best green Halloween check out Summit County, Park City and Heber Valley visitor websites for a list of local fall family activities you might not otherwise think of: fall harvest festivals and hay rides, corn mazes, Halloween yards, WitchFest, Pumpkin Days, Little Haunts, Halloween train rides, Haunted Hollows, Halloween films, and even an opportunity to swim with pumpkins! Don’t miss Halloween on Historic Main Street in Park City!  

Recycle Utah, your community non-profit drop-off recycling center, provides these weekly tips. Visit their website for more information — www.recycleutah.org.

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Ever wonder what happens to those plastic bags you stuff into the recycling containers at retailers? The ones you sometimes have to hunt for near the store’s entryway?

These bins aren’t just for shopping bags — they’re for all sorts of stretchy plastic film, like shopping and home shipping bags, bread bags, frozen food bags, zip-lock bags, sandwich bags, produce bags, kitchen wrap, dry cleaning bags, and bubble wrap.

But not everything belongs here. Leave out cellophane (it tears and isn’t stretchy) and snack wrappers (they’re often too small or made of mixed materials).

This plastic film packaging made from stretchy polyethylene is recyclable at many retailers and drop-off centers, including Recycle Utah in Park City.

A local retailer explained that collected material is gathered into huge shipping bags, combined with the store’s own plastic packaging waste and transported to facilities. There, it’s sorted, baled and processed into plastic pellets. These pellets are used to make new products, including plastic bags and synthetic lumber for fencing, decking, and outdoor furniture.

To ensure your plastic film can be recycled, it must be clean, dry and meet the location’s guidelines. Contaminants like food, liquids, or non-recyclable items can ruin a load, making it unusable and destined for the landfill. If you’re ever unsure, it’s better to throw it out than risk contamination.

One of the biggest players in recycling this material is Trex, a manufacturer of durable composite lumber. According to Trex, a 500-square-foot deck contains 140,000 recycled plastic bags! Since its founding in 1996, the company has diverted more than 5 billion pounds of plastic bags and film from landfills.

Trex has partnered with retailers and businesses to make plastic film recycling more accessible. To find a nearby drop-off location, visit nextrex.com. Smith’s stores, for example, are Trex recycling partners, making it easy for you to recycle responsibly.

Recycle Utah, your community non-profit drop-off recycling center, provides these weekly tips. Visit their website for more information: www.recycleutah.org.

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Considering the environmental impact of your daily habits and the potential for utility savings, you may find it worthwhile to adopt more energy-efficient cooking methods.

Using appliances like air fryers, toaster ovens and crockpots instead of a traditional stove or oven can make a big difference.

Cooking with an air fryer, toaster oven and crockpot can maximize sustainable home cooking. All of these countertop appliances require significantly less electricity than an electric stove, and they enable you to cook without using your gas stove. Look for models with energy star ratings for the greatest energy conservation.

Because of its small cooking chamber and super-convection, an air fryer cooks food much faster than a traditional oven — often in about half the time.

Air fryers heat up much faster than full-size ovens. Food cooked in air fryers becomes crispy and flavorful with little or no added oil, promoting healthy cooking. Roast vegetables, cook meat and fish, make french fries and veggie chips, and crisp up leftovers in your air fryer.

Both an air fryer and toaster oven allow for precision cooking and temperature control, so it’s easy to avoid overcooking food and unnecessary food waste. Their smaller cooking capacity encourages portion control and minimizes preparing and wasting excessive amounts of food.

When reheating food, using an air fryer or toaster oven is much more energy efficient than heating up a large oven. Use a toaster oven to cook a few baked potatoes, small portions of pastries, and quickly broil vegetables and fish.

A crockpot is an excellent choice for preparing large batches of food in advance, reducing the need for multiple cooking sessions and saving energy in the process.

Because it is designed to operate cheaply at low temperatures for an extended period of time, using an unattended crockpot per manufacturer instructions is generally considered safe. Braise tough cuts of meat, and cook stews, soup, and beans in a large crockpot.

Recycle Utah, your community non-profit drop-off recycling center, provides these weekly tips. Visit their website for more information: www.recycleutah.org.

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Eighty percent of the world’s population, and 99 percent of Americans and Europeans, live with some amount of light pollution.

This excessive artificial nighttime light adversely affects the health and behavior of humans and other animals. It obscures views of the vast and starry nighttime sky. It wastes precious electricity from all sources and increases use of fossil fuels.

Nighttime light attracts or repels animals affecting their feeding, predatory, and breeding behaviors. Its glow causes a loss of safe habitat. Birds, insects, reptiles, amphibians and mammals are all affected.

In our community, abundant wildlife and the nighttime visual environment are cherished parts of residents’ daily lives and visitors’ unique experiences.

Several years ago Park City and Summit County leaders committed to lowering our energy footprint. To preserve dark skies, they also adopted ordinances into existing codes which require all businesses and residents, not only new construction, to reduce their artificial light pollution with a compliance deadline set for Dec. 31, 2024.

DarkSky International, established in 1988, led the movement to reduce light pollution globally.

Dark sky requirements seek to reduce glare and light spillage. In order to do this, Summit County and Park City require the use of downward-pointing, fully shielded outdoor light fixtures. These target light rather than flood an area wastefully and obtrusively with it. Warm whites or amber bulbs of 3,000K or less are also required. Motion sensors, timers and dimmers are recommended to increase efficiency.

Regarding outdoor seasonal displays, residential lights are permitted from Nov. 1 to March 1, and must be turned off by 11 p.m. City and county staff have found no grants currently available offering rebates for dark sky-friendly lighting.

They continue to focus on educating the public about the nighttime lighting ordinances and dark sky-friendly products and practices. Enforcement of the ordinances begins with residents’ education, on a complaint basis.

There are differences between the Snyderville Basin, Eastern Summit County and Park City codes. To learn more about their dark sky ordinances, visit summitcountyutah.gov/2474/Dark-Skies and engageparkcity.org/dark-sky.

Recycle Utah, your community non-profit drop-off recycling center, provides these weekly tips. Visit their website for more information – www.recycleutah.org.

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When planning a more sustainable vacation, your choices extend past your transportation options. There are things you can do throughout every leg of your trip to make your vacation greener.

Consider visiting more than one destination when traveling — combining trips saves fuel and reduces carbon emissions. In their 2023 Sustainable Travel Report, Booking.com found that more than 75% of respondents want to make their vacations sustainable. However, almost 50% said barriers include the higher cost and perceived lack of sustainable options, and uncertainty of where to search for environmental and social equity stewardship opportunities.

Sustainable travel doesn’t have to be hard! Here are a few tips to make your trip more green:

• Bring a sturdy water bottle. At the airport, make sure it’s empty as you go through TSA, then fill it at a drinking fountain.
• Bring wired headphones to use with airline entertainment systems so you won’t need to use new disposable ones.
• Bring your reusable shopping bags.
• Pack shampoo and soap bars in small reusable containers.
• Purchase sunscreen that doesn’t contain chemicals that harm water and coral quality. Research shows regular commercial sunscreens can bleach coral.
• Pack common reusable items like cutlery, small containers, cloth napkins, and snack bags.
• Pack light —l eave the extra weight at home and you’ll travel easier and with better fuel efficiency.

Your eco-friendly behaviors travel with you! Turn off lights, and turn down heat and air-conditioning when you leave your lodging. Refuse Styrofoam cups and plates and use your own reusable ones instead. Find and use recycling bins to dispose of plastic and paper items. At restaurants, skip the glass of water that’s offered unless you want it, and be aware of your food waste. Ask if you can share a serving, or order a variety of items and you’ll get to try more local dishes.

When it comes to activities, consider renting bikes to travel locally and look for local walking tours instead of riding a tour bus. Public transit is also a great way to explore a new city!

Visit protected lands and waterways. Stay on trails, and observe — not interact with — wildlife.

If you think to carry a bag to pick up litter, visitors can enjoy cleaner and more beautiful sites and reduce pollution.

Educate others about your top eco-friendly travel tips! This includes letting managers in resort businesses know what they can do to increase the sustainability of their operations. Let them know that doing so will increase customer satisfaction. Even when you’re out of town, you can have an impact spreading sustainable tourism wherever you are!

Recycle Utah, your community non-profit drop-off recycling center, provides these weekly tips. Visit their website for more information – www.recycleutah.org.

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By Bev Harrison

In 2016, Recycle Utah initiated the Green Business Program, providing free support to companies that are committed to undertaking specific sustainable operations actions. In 2022, they partnered with Park City Municipal, Summit County and the Park City Chamber of Commerce, enabling the program to become more rigorous with additional requirements, resources, and recognition for members.

Currently, 51 businesses participate, and each has selected actions to undertake from five categories: energy efficiency, water conservation, materials management, transportation and social equity. Depending on the number of actions businesses commit to, they move within the program from entry-level green circle, to intermediate blue square to the most-aggressive black diamond level.

At January’s Green Drinks annual awards event, winning green businesses were recognized for their commitment and success in operating more sustainably. We can learn from their actions.

Park City Mountain Resort, performing at the highest black diamond level, is the 2023 Green Business of the Year. Perhaps the most noticeable of their sustainability initiatives is their waste diversion operation. Restaurant guests take their food trays to sorting stations, and staff sort it into compostables, recyclables, soft plastic wraps and snack wrappers. This system keeps contamination from improper sorting to a minimum. There are trash, recycling and snack wrapper cans for guests to use outside. Last year, Park City Mountain diverted a whopping 546 tons of waste from the landfill with 185 tons of it being food waste! To work, it takes our cooperation.

Abode Luxury Rentals won the Zest for Zero award, which recognizes a company that has made fast progress entering the program. As they have done in their properties, their eco-friendly suggestions include reducing their heat to 55 degrees in unoccupied homes, eliminating bottled water and liquid soap pump bottles, using timed-aerated faucets, using dissolvable laundry-detergent sheets, following local no-idling regulations, providing guests recycling bins and recycling guidelines and utilizing transit schedules and maps.

FulFILLed Lifestyle Co., another highest-level performer, won the People’s Choice Award. It is a zero-waste and refill store located at the Outlets Park City. Their suggestions? Eliminate packaging by buying eco-friendly personal care and house cleaning products in containers you reuse and refill, and skip taking bags for your purchases.

Recycle Utah, your community non-profit drop-off recycling center, provides these weekly tips. Visit their website for more information — www.recycleutah.org.

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Are you making the best choice with your family’s food waste?

Food scraps we grind up in the garbage disposal, an appliance generally prohibited in Europe, travel through 300 miles of aging sewer pipes to a water reclamation district plant. There, the food waste may or may not pass through huge entry filters.

If it makes it, it continues flowing with the rest of the organic solids in our wastewater for further treatment.

In the process, byproduct bio gas — 60% methane, and carbon dioxide — is emitted.

The organic solids that don’t pass through the filters become a gritty sludge that is trucked to, yes, the Three Mile Canyon Landfill. There it decomposes anaerobically, along with the food waste we throw in the trash can, creating methane gas.

The Snyderville Basin Water Reclamation District plants and Summit County’s landfill are relatively very small and neither has a methane cap system. In 2020, the reclamation district captured and trucked 300 tons of sludge to the landfill. Last year we dumped 1,400 tons of food waste there — 30% of the landfill’s total solid waste.

Our best choice? To divert food waste from the landfill and reduce methane pollution, we must compost it and turn it naturally into a nutrient-rich soil amendment.

We have four composting choices: backyard composting (bins available to purchase at Recycle Utah), electric indoor composting, worm composting, and membership in Spoil to Soil’s curbside composting service.

Spoil to Soil’s rapidly growing 44-acre off-grid farm in Brown’s Canyon accepts all food waste. In addition to plant-based food, houseplants and yard waste, they now accept meat, bone, grains, dairy, grease, soiled paper towels, uncoated paper products and cardboard. Contact them at www.spoiltosoil.org to learn more.

Parents tell their children to “clean your plate.” The expression came into existence in World War I, when the federal government worried about wartime food shortages. It was revived during World War II, when Harry Truman urged Americans to curb their food waste to send food supplies to starving post-war Europeans.

Elementary schools promptly formed Clean Your Plate Clubs! So, figure out how composting can work for your family and “clean your plate.”

Don’t run the disposal. Don’t throw food waste in the trash can, and enjoy making a lot fewer trips dragging your trash barrel to the curb.

Recycle Utah, your neighborhood community drop-off recycling center, provides these weekly tips. Visit their website for more information at www.recycle utah.org.

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The season of peace on Earth, good will to all is upon us. This season is followed by the official date for us to make next year’s resolutions, making this a good sequence of events as far as we on an ever-warming planet are concerned.

There are so many things we can resolve to do to not only to live more sustainably, but to help assure that others, including those in business and government, do too.

If your elementary-age child attends school in Park City or in some North and South Summit locations, know that Recycle Utah educators are teaching them about our impact on the environment and how to live in ways that protect it. Enlist their help in choosing what things your family can do — joyfully.

Peace fosters the positive economic, political and social factors that create sustainable development. It’s important that we work to elect people who have made public their actions to create and implement peace-building policies.

Wish for others a life of sustainable prosperity — one in which they prosper in ways that withstand shocks, ensure a good and healthy quality of life, and do not require polluting and overusing Earth’s decreasing natural resources.

Let the spirit of the holiday season guide you to make Earth-friendly 2024 resolutions. Vow to buy less, launder less, donate, consign and recycle send gifts of experiences, shop locally, avoid single-use plastic, conserve water at the faucet, turn off lights, turn off your car, turn down the heat, compost, use your disposal, take a bus.

Learn more about how you can help slow down climate change.

Recycle Utah, your community non-profit drop-off recycling center, provides these weekly tips. Visit their website for more information at www.recycleutah.org.

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‘Tis the season for wearing and covering up with (polyester) fleece — pullovers, jackets, vests, coats, hats, blankets.

It’s warm, soft and plush, lightweight, durable, water resistant, and fast drying. When it’s cold, we love our fleece!

Unfortunately, fleece is a bad guy when it comes to microplastic water pollution. Every time it’s tumbled and tossed in the washing machine, its soft plastic microfibers sluff off into particles no bigger than 3/16 of an inch — too small to be trapped by machine filters and downstream, through the water reclamation process. Its resting spot? Rivers, lakes and oceans where the microplastic particles are easily ingested by aquatic organisms.

All fabrics shed microfibers in the washing machine, but plastic polyesters shed non-biodegradable ones, and when it comes to the numbers, fleece is the champion. It sheds about 100 times more than the same amount of other polyester fabric. And it’s because polyester is the dominant fiber now, that all this microplastic water pollution is the huge and dangerous problem it is.

Are consumers, especially we Americans, washing our fleece when it isn’t dirty? Do we over-wash because it’s easy and we think it must be dirty?

Here are some Earth-friendly fleece care tips. Fleece is made to be durable. Hang on to the fleece you have! Take care of each item.

Before washing, consider: Does it smell? Fabric that doesn’t hug your skin, doesn’t collect odor like fabrics that do.

Hang fleece items loosely so air circulates through and around the fibers.

Brush off surface dirt and smudges. If there’s a stain, try spot cleaning it.

The less you launder your fleece, the longer its fibers will stay intact. Donate, consign and buy secondhand fleece items.

Also, remember by caring for and keeping fleece in use, we are keeping plastic waste out of the landfill.

Recycle Utah, your neighborhood community, non-profit drop-off recycling center, provides these weekly tips. Visit their website for more information — www.recycleutah.org.

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