The award comes from Park City’s Green Business Program, a partnership with Park City Municipal, Park City Community Foundation, Recycle Utah and the Park City Chamber and Visitors Bureau.
Abode Luxury Rentals was recognized for its commitment to sustainability across its 200 Park City properties, Summit County Councilmember Canice Harte said.
“Mattresses from their properties are recycled through the Spring Back Utah. Donation-ready food is left behind by guests, is collected by housekeeping staff and taken to the Christian Center pantry,” Harte said at the award ceremony in September. “And those may sound like relatively small or simple actions individually, but collectively they demonstrate something important: a willingness to look closely at everyday operations and ask, "Can we do this better?”
Abode focuses on using recyclable products and reducing food waste, Sustainability Manager Julie Finnegan said.
She said the business recently partnered with Momentum Recycling to compost office food waste. Now, it is working to find ways to implement the practice in its luxury rentals.
“Having a composting system at every individual vacation rental isn’t really practical in cost or operationally, and we also can’t count on every guest to participate consistently,” Finnegan said on KPCW’s “Local News Hour” Sept. 23. “This is an area we definitely need to do more, and ideally we’d like to move from being reactive to finding a more preventative solution.”
She said the company’s sustainability initiatives started from the bottom up, using cardboard recyclable boxes for laundry and stainless-steel cookware.
“When we were first getting started, I was just picking low-growing, low-hanging fruit, so to speak,” Finnegan said. “What would be the easiest for us to do, the lowest cost, the easiest operationally to get us started?”
Finnegan said her company fits with Park City’s sustainability goals.
“The bigger goal is to find a solution that would work not just for us, but potentially for other vacation rentals in our community as well,” Finnegan said. “And I really think that’s an important piece of reaching Park City’s goal of zero waste by 2030.”
Abode Rentals also has properties in Jackson Hole and Sun Valley.
