Introducing Salt Lake City’s Air Quality Action Day Program for Employees
We had an amazing December with lots of storms and snow that filled our mountains and gave kids around the neighborhood plenty of opportunities to build snowmen.
But this week the dreaded high pressure took hold and we’re looking at several days, if not a couple of weeks, of inversions. This means that whatever we emit into the air stays there. And pollution doubles every day. Yuck!
This is the time for us all to prioritize ways to reduce our contribution to the haze.
It’s also a fitting time for Salt Lake City to launch a new air quality program.
As you’ll recall, Salt Lake City works hard to create programs, projects, and policies to improve air quality:
We passed one of the first anti-idling ordinances in the state; continue to prioritize electric vehicles for our fleet, as well as offer free charging at City-owned EV stations for the community; implemented a building benchmarking ordinance to measure and reduce emissions from our city’s largest commercial buildings; and just last month the RDA passed an aggressive new sustainability policy to significantly reduce air pollution from new building construction that receives RDA funding. (Learn more about Salt Lake City’s air quality efforts here).
We also aim to reduce emissions by implementing air-conscious internal policies with our 3,000-strong workforce.
And one of the ways we can do this is to encourage best practices within our workforce on days when the air quality is forecasted to be unhealthy.
This is the intention behind the Air Quality Action Day program which launched in December 2021 (and was debuted during our inversion this week).
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