Recycling Helps to Save the Landfill (and Taxpayer Dollars!)

The Salt Lake County Recycling Office staff conducted over 120 tours of the Salt Lake Valley Landfill in 2013. Many groups come to see where their garbage goes and discover ways to prevent so much of it from going into the landfill. Our landfill takes in 3 million pounds of garbage per DAY!  That adds up. Many don’t know how valuable our landfill is to our ability to dispose of waste. Without our landfill, what would happen?  One thing for sure – our fees for garbage collection and disposal would be much higher (think 10 times higher).

Salt Lake County residents have a great tool to help preserve our landfill: Recycling! All Salt Lake County residents have the ability to recycle materials from their homes – even people in apartments and condos. Things like plastic bottles, aluminum and steel cans, cereal boxes, newspapers, and moving boxes make up about 60 percent of the waste in our landfill. Imagine the life we could add to our landfill by recycling these things! When we send these things to the landfill, their life is over.

When we make the choice to put something in the recycling bin instead of the garbage container, we give that product new life. For example, plastic soda and water bottles can be recycled into fibers that can be used to make fleece jackets or carpet. It takes about 400 soda bottles to make a fleece jacket.  Those same bottles in the landfill will just take up space and eventually leach chemicals into our environment. Unfortunately, very few plastic water bottles are recycled – The average person uses 167 plastic water bottles per year but recycles only 38.

Recycling is so important to the life of the landfill and to our environment that Mayor McAdams issued a challenge to residents to increase our recycling by 20 percent. Recycling has many benefits including reducing air pollution. A national recycling rate of 30 percent reduces greenhouse gas emissions as much as removing nearly 25 million cars from the road.

So next time you have paper, plastic, metal, or other recyclable items, but them in a recycling bin. (They don't even need to be rinsed out!) For ideas on increasing your recycling, visit our recycling website.