At the Park City Library last week, organizations from across the state, country, and even the world gathered to talk about food waste — and how even a small tourist town can have a big impact.
Imagine coming home from the grocery store with three big paper bags full of groceries — then taking one of those bags and throwing it away.
On a much grander scale than your kitchen counter, that’s what food waste looks like in the U.S.
According to the Food and Drug Administration, between 30-40% of the food supply is wasted, whether at the retail or consumer levels.
“It's enough food to feed a third of the U.S. population, which would be hypothetically enough food to feed the 50 million food insecure that we have here in the U.S.,” said Hayden Dansky, co-founder of Boulder Food Rescue in Colorado.
Food waste in Park City
Dansky was one of many speakers at the Zero Waste Forum not based in Park City, including the organizing nonprofit Race to Zero Waste.
So why did it come to Utah this year? And why a ski town of 8,000 people instead of somewhere like Salt Lake City?
One reason is because a tourist town like Park City, which sees millions of visitors every year, has a much bigger footprint than its residents.
“We know tourism also creates a lot of waste in general, but a surprising amount of food waste,” said Alexx Goeller, CEO of the Utah food rescue organization WasteLess Solutions, which just started working in Summit County last year.
That waste comes from a lot of sources: short term rentals, overshopping for groceries while on vacation, large groups coming in for conferences, resorts, and the restaurant industry, just to name a few.
And while Park City is known to be a fairly wealthy community, that doesn’t mean that wasted food couldn’t go to those in need.
“One in 10 residents struggle to consistently access food — particularly fresh, perishable, highly nutritious foods,” Goeller said.
“A lot of the food pantries up here say that many of the folks accessing their services are, in fact, the tourism and service industry workers who are here to make this tourism town thriving and booming,” she added.
Local solutions
Park City’s problem with food waste isn't the only reason it hosted the forum this year, though — the community is also working on a number of solutions.
Laura England is the sustainability coordinator for Park City School District and a seventh grade science teacher.
Her district has tackled food waste in some familiar ways — educating students in class, calculating how much food is needed before making it, and having simple signage to explain if something should be thrown away versus recycled or composted.
A slightly more unique solution, however, has been the use of “share tables,” where uneaten leftovers that aren’t easily contaminated — like whole fruits or packaged chips — are put out for students who are food insecure or just still hungry.
“And if you've ever been in a middle school lunchroom, or just in a middle school in general, students are starving all of the time,” England said.
The district also has quarterly events to get both students and their families involved in reducing waste, including composting pumpkins after Halloween and Christmas trees after the winter holidays.
All that work has paid off. Last year, all seven schools in Park City earned Utah Green Schools Certifications, and from August 2025 to March 2026, the district diverted over 174,000 pounds of food to compost.
Meanwhile, at the Park City municipal level, environmental sustainability project manager Celia Peterson has been looking at slightly larger scale ways to reduce waste.
“Keeping stuff out of the landfill is a big step forward for Park City," Peterson said. “All that being said, I'm really interested in working upstream. So that's like thinking about ways that we could not create waste in the first place.”
A zero waste event
The forum didn’t just focus on Park City — there were also tech companies, out-of-state nonprofits, global organizations, even a group of teens from Hawaii dedicated to reducing waste, all of whom brought their own ideas and perspectives.
But throughout the forum, it was clear that while the problem of food waste is global, the solutions have to be local.
"We don't want to be transporting food across the country for people that are in need of food," said Steve Jewett with Earth Day. "The resources are here, locally, and that's the most important part of that equation."
For Hayden Sloan with Race to Zero Waste, local impact also included organizing the forum itself.
“Literally everything that we do about the event is like, okay, how will this generate waste? How can we avoid generating waste in this way?” Sloan said.
The list of considerations was endless — number of registrants, what things are packaged in, what gets printed out for the event, even the coffee stirrers.
“We had the sustainability in action awards, so we think about the production of the awards themselves,” Sloan added. “We worked with an organization called Techwears that does awards out of like motherboards, like upcycled motherboards.”
Many reusable items will likely be repurposed for later forums — but the reusable dishware stayed behind as a gift to Park City Library for many more events to come.
“Usually for events, we try to be sustainable,” said Rylee Broach, the adult services librarian at Park City Library. “But now we have implemented a long-lasting change because of this.”
“That lasting impact is what we’re looking at,” Sloan added. “We're bringing this convergence of people and ideas, but we're also saying, look at what's possible, and here you go, you know? Like, take these ideas and run with them.”
