Have you noticed a line-up of yellow buckets on a bench outside Recycle Utah’s office? They are there for us to recycle all sorts of hard-to-recycle items. There is one bucket for dropping off oral care products—dental floss containers, floss sticks, toothbrushes, and empty toothpaste tubes. In other buckets, you can drop off contact lenses, PFAS ski wax and Brita water filters. Another is for cell phones, iPods, tablets, and remote controllers. There is one for products that contain mercury—thermometers, smoke detectors, and blood pressure gauges. There’s a bucket for CDs and DVDs, and a few for different types of batteries. There’s even a bucket for tennis balls for our dogs! Ask staff if you have any questions about recycling hard-to-recycle items.

Recycle Utah sends their collected oral care recyclables to TerraCycle, a company headquartered in New Jersey, that coordinates their reprocessing into different materials and products. By doing this with an ever-growing number of recyclables, TerraCycle and their global partners keep trash out of landfills or from incineration. 

Park City Mountain started a snack wrapper recycling program with TerraCycle in FY2021. With funding support from Frito Lay/PepsiCo they collect wrappers during the winter season in their on-mountain restaurants. These are shipped to TerraCycle and a third party uses the material to manufacture outdoor furniture. Check out the deck furniture at Park City Mountain’s Summit House and Canyons’ Sun Lodge, made out of recycled snack wrappers! All wrappers are recycled in kitchen areas by trained staff as contamination from food waste and non-recyclables is too high when guests sort in public-facing bins. During the busy winter months, Park City has shipped out 2-3 mega-bags each month. According to Erin Fulmore, Sustainability Coordinator for PCMR, in FY2024, they recycled 1.51 tons of wrappers. Erin guessed this is the equivalent of 3 full-grown walruses! Given the average weight of a wrapper is 1 gram, that’s about 1,369,848 individual wrappers.

Don’t get stuck thinking you don’t need to recycle your small hard-to-recycle things because they’ll never amount to any significant diversion from the landfill. Think about PCMR’s snack wrapper outdoor furniture before you decide your little trash items will never be put to good re-use. 

By Bev Harrison