PARK CITY, Utah — A few years ago, Carissa Devenport started collecting food waste at Este Pizzeria in Park City.
“Food waste was something when we first opened that we noticed was a huge issue, because we have a lot of tourists that come into town and don't necessarily have a fridge to put half a pizza in in their hotel rooms,” she said.
Since 2021, Devenport’s restaurant has diverted about 26,000 pounds of food waste from landfills, she said.
“We obviously stock for the season that we're in, and so we do smaller runs for like fresh produce and things like that just so that everything remains really fresh, and then we don't throw anything away,” said Devenport. “Any vegetable scraps that we have, we try and utilize in other recipes.”
Last year, Park City announced its goal to keep all food waste out of Summit County’s landfill by 2030.
“Summit County owns a landfill. The landfill is full,” said Andy Hecht, Climate Fund Manager for Park City Community Foundation. “We're building a new landfill next year. It's incredibly expensive. 40 to 60 percent of everything that's going into that landfill is food waste.”
Hecht hopes that soon every business and resident in Park City will have three bins: one for trash, one for recycling and one for food waste.
“When food goes into a landfill, it does not decompose,” he said. “It does not join the nutrient cycle. It will never turn into soil again. It sits there and it rots, and the way it rots is without oxygen, and that produces massive amounts of methane. Methane in the atmosphere is close to 84 times more potent of a greenhouse gas than CO2.”
Devenport hopes everyone can see the environmental and economical benefits of making this change.
“We only have so much room,” she said. “It's a finite space, and so trying to keep food waste out of the landfills is really, really important.”
