PARK CITY, Utah — On an average day at Recycle Utah, about 400 people drive through to dispose of their glass, cardboard and harder-to-recycle items, like electronics and Styrofoam.
But the Park City nonprofit says it sees even more demand during the holidays, with lines sometimes snaking down the street as more like 600 to 800 cars come through each day.
“We receive probably at least twice as much if not three times as much recycling in the weeks after Christmas,” said Chelsea Hafer, Recycle Utah’s education director, in a recent interview with FOX 13 News. “And most of that is packaging.”
Researchers estimate that household waste can increase by 25% nationwide in the weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas, amounting to an extra 25 million tons of garbage.
In Utah, data shows the majority of that waste will likely end up in garbage bins.
The Utah Department of Environmental Quality’s data shows that only about 5% of waste produced in Utah was recycled or composted in 2023 — a number Hafer argues is “way lower than it should be.”
The national recycling rate is more than six times higher, at 32%, according to the state.
Most waste sent to recycling facilities in Utah is successfully recycled, meaning “we generally put the correct materials in our recycling bin,” according to the Department of Environmental Quality. But the agency says many consumers aren’t recycling their waste at all.
“Based on this data, there is a need to increase how much material Utahns are sending to recycling and composting facilities,” the department said, encouraging cities and towns to assess “the availability and use of recycling bins in their area” and identify other barriers to recycling.
Midway resident Bernadette Bohanon lives in an area that doesn’t offer curbside recycling and said she feels like many people “won’t take the time sometimes to go to a recycling center.”
So when she loads her truck with items to take to Recycle Utah, she brings her neighbors’ recycling with her as well.
“I just kind of tell them, 'Drop your recycling off’ and I kind of made a little flyer telling them, you know, what was recyclable,” she recounted. “And then I load up this truck whenever it’s full and drive it up here.”
While it takes extra work, Bohanon said she's "very enthusiastic” about recycling whatever she can.
“It’s beautiful here,” she said. “Don’t you want to keep it out of the landfill?”
‘A lot of Amazon boxes’
Because waste increases so much during the holidays, Hafer said even small individual changes can make a big difference.
For those still doing last-minute holiday shopping, she said the biggest action they can take is to reduce their waste before it ends up in a recycling center or a landfill.
“Think about buying gifts that aren’t material,” she said. “So buying gift cards to restaurants, buying a massage gift card, things like that. Because I think people enjoy those just as much, but it just doesn’t create the waste.”
She also suggests people buy products made from recycled materials, handmake gifts from things they already have around the house and purchase higher-quality items that won’t wear out as quickly.
“When you’re thinking about all the things that you’re getting for other people, you can definitely think about how that will impact the Earth,” she added.
When it comes time to wrap gifts, Hafer encouraged the use of recyclable paper and other reusable materials.
“I keep gift bags year after year,” she said. “I think you can reuse tissue paper year after year [as well as] ribbons, things like that that aren’t as recyclable. And then recycle whatever you can.”
Bohanan expects she’ll be back at Recycle Utah in a few weeks with her neighborhood’s post-holiday haul.
“We’re kind of a consumer culture, right?” she said. “So there’s a lot of Amazon boxes.”
She urged others to also give their trash a chance at a new life in the new year.
“It kind of makes up for the fact that we’re consuming all this stuff,” she said.
The Utah Department of Environmental Quality has an interactive recycling map, which includes locations to take harder-to-recycle items. While curbside recycling can vary across municipalities, the Recycling Coalition of Utah has a list of six universal items that can be recycled statewide: cardboard, paper, food boxes, aluminum cans, steel cans and plastic containers.
