Recycle Utah

Nonprofit Summit County, Utah Recycling Center

#vehicles

Transportation and Climate Change

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How are you getting to where you need to go? In Park City, transportation is a commonly debated subject, and a great opportunity to be more sustainable. During the winter, thousands of skiers flock to the mountain resorts and, as locals know, this causes major inconveniences such as traffic and parking space. Ski transportation is not only a logistical problem, but also a catalyst in contributing to global warming.

Transportation is the largest contributor to carbon emissions compared to any other emitter in the U.S. The U.S. Department of Transportation says, “The average passenger car in the United States produces just under one pound of carbon dioxide per mile traveled.” Meanwhile, similar statistics show that per passenger mile, bus transit produces 33% less greenhouse gas emissions. It may be a slight inconvenience to drive to a Park-n-Ride, or to take Park City transit, but overall it can be a more convenient option, especially when the parking lots are all full within a mile radius of the ski resorts. Having a more open mindset about public transportation can make getting to the mountain a less stressful process and can decrease your carbon footprint. Carpooling is also an excellent option!

Additionally, mountain biking culture here in Park City offers wonderful opportunities to reduce your carbon footprint. Shoutout to all bikers (competitive or just recreational), who choose to bike to their destinations. Although it may not be as fast, biking is a great way to get exercise while getting to your destination. Depending on where you live in Park City, it can be an even quicker form of transportation while avoiding all the car traffic. 

So overall what can you do to travel more sustainably?

  • Carpool!
  • Use public transportation.
  • Bike or walk.
  • If you’re considering purchasing a new vehicle, try getting a low-emission one. Visit epa.gov/greenvehicles.

By Grayson Rae, Sophomore at Park City High School

How Does Your Garden Grow?

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Choosing plants that will thrive in your garden does not have to be difficult. Just look around in our meadows, forests, and sagebrush lands. What flowers and shrubs do you see? To name a few, there are lupins, flax, penstemon, clematis, phlox, Oregon grape, globemallow, flax, wood’s rose, chokecherry, golden currant, sunflowers and rabbit brush. Reach out to USU Extension Service Horticulturists, Swaner Preserve naturalists, and plant nursery garden specialists and they can provide you information about these and other “natives”. These are not the hybridized specimens you choose for their brilliant colors and large blooms. Planted in places that match their natural habitat, natives will thrive without fertilizer and pesticides, and with little additional water. Your native garden is an extension of the landscape surrounding it.

Utahns waste a lot of water. Ours is the second driest state and we are one of the highest per-capital populations of water consumers. Planting a native garden saves water. Use drip irrigation and water regularly to establish plants’ deep roots. Then drip water infrequently when their leaves are droopy or crisp. With less maintenance time required, there is more time to hike and bike!

Utah has over 1000 species of habitat-specific bee pollinators. They have incredibly specialized relationships with the plant species they pollinate and require for reproduction. We should plant these natives to maintain bee and plant populations.

Birds eat the seeds of native plants which provide them much needed habitat. A woman in Chicago planted a native garden on one-tenth of an acre of land that attracted 116 species of birds to her “little yard!”

 Enjoy a sustainable ecosystem of native plants in your garden!

By Bev Harrison

The Impact of Lawns on Climate Change

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Over 40 million acres of the United States are covered by lawns with two percent of land occupied by turf grass and $30 billion spent on lawn care. Lawns are indicators of socio-economic status in America and the culture surrounding lawns has created a unique but extreme threat to climate change and our carbon footprint. From the water to the fertilizers and equipment needed to maintain a well-kept, Americanized lawn, the toll on the environment is serious.

Most lawn equipment uses gasoline and are two-stroke or four-stroke engines. Thirty percent of the fuel in two-stroke engines don’t combust completely releasing high levels of exhaust emissions. While four-stroke engines are less harmful than two-stroke, one study found that a four-stroke engine running for an hour released emissions equivalent to a vehicle traveling for 500 miles. Five percent of total emissions in the United States are from lawn equipment with an average of 800 million gallons of fuel used annually and 17 million gallons of that spilled.

Interested in having a more environmentally friendly lawn? Here are a couple tips:

  1. Switch to electric lawn equipment! While electric equipment can cost more up front, you will save overtime by not having to maintain fuel. Electric lawn equipment is powerful, compact, and easy to use.
  2. Rather than planting turf grass that creates an artificial environment and stunts biodiversity in the local ecosystem, grow native plants on your lawn. Native grasses, flowers, and ground-cover plants require little maintenance and allow the local ecosystem to thrive.

By Addison Marr

Join the Crowd of Local Free-Fare Transit Travelers

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Transit travelers are decreasing their carbon footprint by approximately 4 pounds of CO2 for each hour of drive time. (EPA). Since its launch in July 2021, Summit County’s High Valley Transit (HVT) ridership has grown to almost 1.5 million. People are taking 1000 daily rides on Micro-transit; they have made 14,000 bus trips between Park City and Heber City since November 2022.

To make transit convenient, learn how to use the HVT and MyStop (Park City) apps or use Google Maps. Click on trip planning and set your pick-up location and destination. In real-time, you’ll see different pick-up times at the nearest stop, the time it will take you to get there; the specific bus or buses you can take; and your arrival time.

Get a comprehensive Ride Guide, go to the bus schedules tab in the HVT app or the Park City Transit website (schedule and routes) to check out the different bus numbers and colors, and their scheduled arrival times at different stops. Understand that these are the times you can expect a bus to arrive at a stop under “normal” weather and traffic conditions, full employment, and a fully operational fleet.

Remember, peak traffic and inclement weather affect vehicle and transit travel alike. And because buses can legally travel in the breakdown lanes on routes 224 and 248, your actual bus travel time could be faster than driving during heavy traffic conditions.

Taking the bus may be comparable in time to driving your vehicle when you consider parking and walking to where you want to be. Try asking someone your transit questions. They just might tell you the information you need to take a ride.

Vehicles: An Unexpected Source of Fire Danger

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While we live in a beautiful ski town, Park City is also a high-mountain desert; with that comes the threat of summer forest fires. Fire safety is as important as ever considering Utah’s severe state of drought. There are some simple steps we can all take to protect our precious town from the dangers that fires impose, especially when it comes to our vehicles.

Vehicles are an all too common source of local fires, due to a few common factors. It is important to not park a hot car on dry grass, as this can lead to the grass catching on fire. Maintaining normal tire pressure is also quite significant as a tire blowout on the highway can easily start a fire. Objects dangling from cars traveling down highways at 70+mph can create dangerous sparks. Therefore, it is important to secure trailer chains to make sure they don’t drag and spark a fire. For off road vehicles, it is also important to have spark arrestors in them (a mechanical device that traps hot exhaust particles ejected from a combustion engine).  

It is not an understatement to say it is vital to maintain the overall health of your vehicle. In fact, the Lambs Canyon fire of 2021 was started by a simple malfunction of a car’s catalytic converter. Be sure to car for your care with fire safety in mind to help protect our environment and community!

By Pearson Ehrich

The Environmentally Responsible Way to Dispose of Your Clunker

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Access to a vehicle is a vital part of the daily routine for many of us residing in the US. Now, more than ever, we must consider the negative effects vehicles have on our environment. After all, we hear about greenhouse gas emissions and global warming daily. Ideally, not possessing a vehicle is the most earth-friendly option. In addition to saving on costs associated with vehicles such as car payments, auto insurance, fuel, and maintenance, our environment is spared some harm in the form of various pollutants cars produce.

Many times, however, regular use of a vehicle is necessary due to local infrastructure. Unfortunately, mobile sources such as cars, buses, and trucks are our main sources of air pollution, per the National Park Service. These types of vehicles account for more than half of all the air pollution in the US. Not surprisingly, automobiles are the top producer of the group.

The salvage yard- a vehicle disposal option fit for some.

You’ve probably heard of auto salvage yards. These businesses purchase junk vehicles from owners who no longer want them. Some salvage yards dismantle the vehicles and sell the parts directly to customers. Others invite customers to come track down components they are seeking and remove parts themselves.

This can be a decent option. You can get a small sum of money in your pocket. That eyesore-of-a-vehicle that has been sitting in your driveway, leaking oil, and causing neighborhood curmudgeons great displeasure, can be hauled away. However, there happens to be an option superior to that of part salvaging.

The little-known yet most responsible way to dispose of an old vehicle:  Recycling.

I have to confess, this is quite the novel concept to me. You can actually recycle your vehicle in whole. Essentially, it can be stripped down, shredded, and reusable parts can be sorted and distributed. Cars rank number one, annually, when it comes to recycled products in the world. Interesting, huh?

Passenger vehicles are composed of a variety of recyclable materials.

Cars consist of a variety of materials that can be effectively recycled. SellMax a scrap car service in Oceanside, was kind enough to provide me with a material breakdown of the average passenger vehicle they acquire. Main materials are as follows:

  • ferrous metal- 68 percent
  • plastic- 9 percent
  • non-ferrous metals- 9 percent; glass- 3 percent
  • tires- 3 percent
  • fluids- 2 percent
  • rubber- 2 percent
  • electrical parts 1 percent

I had the pleasure of speaking to a local car recycler in Salt Lake City and they affirmed that steel and iron, the ‘ferrous metal’ category, are the prime components of a passenger vehicle. Steel mills purchase shredded ferrous materials from scrappers. Usually, about 90 percent of the steel and iron that a vehicle was composed of are recycled. The fascinating thing about steel is that it is 100 percent recyclable. Essentially, it can be recycled again and again without its quality being compromised.

Glass is another material that is 100 percent recyclable. It is one of the most sustainable materials on earth. Like steel, it can be melted down, repeatedly, without its quality being reduced.

Tires are another component that can be recycled and reused for many purposes, such as gravel substitute, playground flooring, and garden mulch, to name a few. Check out this article at nerc.org for additional uses and more details. One caveat with recycling tires is that they’re a significant source of micro plastic pollution. The good news is that we are coming out with better ways to recycle tires often. For instance, Katherine Gallagher of Treehugger states, “As recently as 2020, a team of chemists at McMaster University discovered a way to break down the rubber used in car tires to turn them into new ones. This innovative method, which consists of dissolving the polymeric oils by separating the sulfur-to-sulfur bond in the tires, is a promising step for the future of recycling.”

Recycling car materials can be beneficial in even more ways than you’d think

The environment considerably benefits from recycling of a variety of materials that make up passenger vehicles. According to the EPA, recycling metal uses about 74 percent less energy than making new steel. Recycling of rubber tires reduces dumping of worn tires in landfills, lakes, and other undesirable locations, per Recycled Rubber Facts. More than 90 percent of tires are being recycled and reused each year. As a result, large amounts of energy are saved, and greenhouse gas emissions are reduced.

The Automotive Recycler’s Association (ARA) has estimated that 24 million gallons of motor oil, 8 million gallons of gasoline and diesel fuel, 8 million gallons of engine coolant, and 5 million gallons of windshield washer fluid are collected annually, resulting in a reduction of air and water pollution.

Another favorable aspect of vehicle recycling is the positive impact it has on our economy. Additional data produced by the ARA asserts that the auto recycling industry employs more than 140,000 US workers at more than 9,000 locations around the country.

The takeaway…

It’s probably safe to say that the statistics clearly support the argument that vehicle recycling is the best way to dispose of an old car. The future of our environment looks a bit more promising if we consider the fact that nearly 12 million cars are recycled in the US each year. We can each do our part. We can continue to reduce, reuse, and recycle. And when the time comes to retire our aged vehicles, we can choose the option to recycle knowing that we have chosen the most environmentally responsible option that will, in fact, make a difference.

You can support Recycle Utah while also recycling your old car by participating in our Donate Your Car program. We partner with a local car recycler, Tear-A-Part Auto, who responsibly reuses/recycles vehicle materials and provides Recycle Utah a cash donation for your vehicle. Visit Recycle Utah’s Donate Your Car page for more information on our program.

By Gabe Vargas

Bio: Gabe is a master’s student at UCSD who is always looking for ways to better the environment. He has a knack for taking complicated subjects and breaking them down into easily understood concepts. While not advocating for the environment he enjoys going on runs and surfing the San Diego Beaches.