The Park City Community Foundation’s mission is to focus on the greatest challenges of our area, including childcare, providing access to sports and recreation opportunity for Latinx youth, and climate change.
The foundation’s Climate Fund specifically ensures resources to implement climate change solutions. According to data pulled by the foundation, Park City has lost six weeks of winter temperatures since the 1970s due to climate change. Fewer days of snow will impact the town’s essential ingredient for the economic livelihood of Park City.
Donations to the fund have supported projects through a grants process. Now, according to the Climate Fund’s manager, Andy Hecht, the money will go toward hiring a consultant to prepare a strategic plan.
“We were sitting on a sizable lump sum we forego for any granting this year, in preparation of this big announcement,” Hecht said. “And we put a hold on grantmaking as we decided what we're doing. Hence, Ben McAdams has been brought in as a consultant to work on our strategic plan. I anticipate about mid-November to be able to share that with the community.”
Ben McAdams, who is familiar with landfills as a former mayor of Salt Lake County, says he’s thrilled to be part of this project that could be replicated in many other mountain communities.
“I get excited talking about landfills and waste and waste diversion,” McAdams said. “Food waste is incredibly impactful on the climate with incredible negative impacts that goes into the landfill and rots. It gets covered by other trash, and then it starts this anaerobic process where it's just creating methane and putting methane out into our air that we're breathing. It's so polluting - both locally, it's leaching into the soil, and potentially making its way into our water sources. And, so, if we want to act locally, to slow climate change globally, food waste is one of the first places we should prioritize.”
The first task is to understand what is happening and what’s already being done. McAdams says 7% of all global greenhouse gas emissions are tied to food waste and 71% of the waste being dumped at the landfill is potentially compostable organic material that includes yard clippings and food waste. The Park City Restaurant Association, and many of the restaurants in the county, he says, already have initiatives underway to reduce that.
“We have the resorts that are already looking at this,” he said. “We have Park City Municipal and Summit County who are active partners at the table who are working alongside the Community Foundation to eliminate and reduce food waste to the landfill. They know that not only is it bad for the environment, but it's expensive. Landfills are expensive. We have a finite life on the landfill in Summit County. We can't continue to just dump into landfills. So, they know that diverting waste from landfill extends that life and saves tax dollars, in addition to other things.”
The Community Foundation hopes to have the strategic plan finished sometime in November and will build a dashboard online by next year so everyone can track the progress of what’s being done over the next six years to fully divert food waste going to the landfill.
