What do composting food, turning off unused electronics and recycling have in common? They’re all ways people and businesses can reduce their carbon footprints! Reducing our carbon footprint – or the amount of greenhouse gases we create through daily activities – is important if we want to stop climate change and its negative effects on our weather, our environment, our economy and our quality of life. That’s why SWACO has committed to reducing its carbon footprint and, ultimately, its impact on climate change. SWACO wants to continue to walk the walk when it comes to protecting the environment.
SWACO recently released their Carbon Emissions Management Plan, which outlines a comprehensive strategy to reduce their carbon emissions 64% by 2032. The plan addresses emissions within their operational and financial control. Coupled together, the plan activities will help SWACO reach its goal and come into alignment with the international Paris Accord standards which seek to limit the global average temperature increase to 1.5°C (2.7°F).
Specifically, SWACO wants to:
- Reduce emissions from our fleet of vehicles and equipment. SWACO’s cars, trucks and equipment are one of the largest sources of carbon emissions. They will continue to transition the fleet from gas and diesel fuel to alternate fuel sources, primarily compressed natural gas and electricity.
- Reduce energy use at our facilities. SWACO will implement conservation measures to reduce the energy use at its headquarters and other facilities and will consider incorporating renewable energy sources, including wind, solar and geothermal, into its power supply.
- Reduce the amount of waste we generate. SWACO employees already recycle, compost and re-use materials, but they’ll step up these efforts to minimize the amount of waste sent to the landfill. They’ll also make a more concerted effort to purchase supplies made of recycled content and adopt other practices that support a circular economy.
- Reduce landfill gas emissions. SWACO will continue to engage in a public-private partnership to capture and reuse methane gas generated at the Franklin County Sanitary Landfill and will continue to offer programs and services to help the community reduce its reliance on the landfill.
While these efforts are robust and innovative, SWACO can’t reach this new goal alone. Reducing the emissions at the landfill requires each of us to reduce our reliance on the landfill by taking these actions: reducing the waste we create and reusing, recycling and composting as much as we can. Today, residents and businesses send over a million tons of material to the landfill every year; that’s equivalent to each of us throwing away 4-5 pounds of material every single day. All of that waste comes to the landfill where it decomposes over many, many years and creates methane gas.
For the past several years, SWACO has partnered with Aria Energy in order to capture that gas, and turn it into clean-burning natural gas which is returned to the pipeline for commercial and residential use. Today, that partnership creates enough gas to heat more than 13,000 central Ohio homes. SWACO also invests hundreds of thousands of dollars every year into grant-funded waste reduction, reuse, recycling and composting activities at local schools and universities, non-profits, events and local governments.
They are going to continue this practice, but they are also going to develop additional programs like Save More Than Food that will help us divert more organic waste from the landfill. Composting, for example, is one of the easiest and most effective ways of keeping food and yard waste out of the landfill.