Summit County officials warn landfill life tight; push to grow recycling, food‑waste pilots

Summit County staff told the county council during a joint meeting with Park City that the county’s primary landfill, 3 Mile Canyon, is nearing its practical limits and that increasing recycling and composting is essential to extend the facility’s lifespan.

“It's a finite space out there. We can't expand forever,” Tim Loveday, a county solid‑waste staff member, said during a presentation. He said bids for a new landfill cell were taken recently and construction on Cell 2 could begin in about a month. County planners estimate the landfill’s design capacity would reach a long‑term limit around 2053 under current assumptions; the county’s built capacity without the new cell would fill much sooner.

The presentation summarized current diversion activity and several pilot programs intended to reduce the volume of material entering the landfill. County curbside service—run under a Republic Services contract—serves about 17,595 homes; county staff reported 2,654 tons of residential recycling last year. At 3 Mile Canyon, total waste disposed in 2024 was reported at 45,899 tons. Using the county’s residential waste and residential recycling figures, staff calculated a residential diversion rate of 26.3%. Measured against the total tonnage disposed at 3 Mile Canyon, the county’s overall diversion rate is about 16.7%, staff said. Those figures exclude many commercial loads because commercial hauler reporting is incomplete.

“The commercial's unknown, and that's really killing us,” Tim Loveday said, describing how backhaul and private contracts leave gaps in county accounting and make an accurate overall diversion rate difficult to calculate.

Park City staff said the city and county are working…