PARK CITY, Utah – A few years ago, Carissa Devenport started collecting food scraps at Este Pizzeria in Park City.

“When we opened, we realized that food waste was a huge problem because many tourists come to the city and don’t necessarily have a fridge in their hotel room where they could put half a pizza,” she says.

Since 2021, Devenport’s restaurant has diverted about 26,000 pounds of food waste from landfills, she said.

“We obviously stock up for what’s in season, so we do smaller batches of fresh fruits and vegetables and things like that so that everything stays really fresh and we don’t throw anything away,” Devenport said. “Any leftover vegetables we have, we try to use in other recipes.”

Last year, Park City announced its goal to divert all food waste from Summit County landfills by 2030.

“Summit County has a landfill. The landfill is full,” said Andy Hecht, Climate Fund Manager for the Park City Community Foundation. “We’re building a new landfill next year. It’s incredibly expensive. Forty to 60 percent of everything that goes into that landfill is food waste.”

Hecht hopes that soon every business and resident in Park City will have three trash cans: one for garbage, one for recycling and one for food waste.

“When food ends up in a landfill, it doesn’t decompose,” he said. “It doesn’t enter the nutrient cycle. It never returns to soil. It sits there and rots, without oxygen, and that creates huge amounts of methane. Methane in the atmosphere is almost 84 times more potent a greenhouse gas than CO2.”

Devenport hopes everyone can see the environmental and economic benefits of this change.

“We have limited space,” she said. “Space is limited, and that’s why it’s really, really important to keep food waste out of landfills.”