The foundation’s zero food waste goal is to eliminate and divert all food waste from the Summit County landfill by 2030.
Climate Fund Manager Andy Hecht said 40% to 60% of Summit County’s trash by weight is food waste. Keeping that amount of food waste out of landfills, he said, prevents massive amounts of methane from entering the atmosphere.
“If you think of methane as a supercharged CO2 over 20 years, it's about 82 times more impactful than CO2 as a greenhouse gas,” he said.
Hecht also said diverting food waste from landfills saves the county money.
“We don't think about the cost of what it takes to move things and put it into a big, giant hole in the ground,” he said. “The estimates from the county say that for every one ton of trash, we avert about $147 per ton of trash.”
The initiative focuses on different segments of the community including residents and commercial entities like hotels and restaurants. Hecht said the goal this year was to have 1,000 residents sign up for food waste collection at their homes and so far, have had around 750 people sign up.
A partnership with Slopeside Village, a workforce housing complex, has helped. Manager Jaime Rincon said the complex will provide composting bins for all 170 kitchens.
“We collect the trash every day, it's one of our services. So we're trying to implement this new project, hopefully starting [in] December,” he said.
Next year, Hecht said the organization will focus on diverting food waste from commercial entities. He said space in commercial kitchens on Main Street is one challenge his team is trying to address. However, he said nightly rentals at Airbnb’s will likely be the toughest to address.
“We look at the Airbnb’s and we see multiple families coming together to stay in one unit. At the end of that stay, you realize each family unit brought their own ketchup bottle, their own mustard bottle, their own relish, and at the end of a four or five nights day, there's enough food there to feed a pretty good family for a little while, and most of that is ending up right now in the trash,” he said.
Locals can sign up for residential food waste collection at the Park City Community Foundation’s website. The foundation will provide a roll of compostable bags and a kitchen caddy. The first month of collection is free, after that, the cost is $19.50 per month for a 5-gallon bin.
