Menlo Park is a part of the South Bayside Waste Management Authority, better known as RethinkWaste, and the public agency recently announced its annual poster contest, which is open to students in grades 3–5 within its local service area. This year’s theme is Compost Champions, which encourages children to demonstrate how they compost their food scraps, dirty paper, and yard trimmings in an art form.

Contest guidelines:

• Participants must be in grades 3–5 in the RethinkWaste service area
• The poster should highlight why it is important to compost food scraps, dirty paper and yard trimmings
• The poster must be on standardized 8.5 x 11-inch white paper in landscape (horizontal) orientation
• All artwork must be original artwork, no copyrighted material, computer graphics or characters
• Artwork must be 2D and in any medium, such as paint, markers, color pencils or crayons

This year’s contest is only for individual students. The first place winner will have their poster displayed on local Recology trucks and the top 3 contest winners will be recognized at the RethinkWaste website and social media and receive amazing reusable items.

Submissions are due online by noon, Friday, October 29. Applications are now available on the poster contest webpage. Spanish-language contest guidelines are also available.

Peninsula Clean Energy is San Mateo County’s official electricity provider – generating clean and affordable power and making significant reinvestments back into the community. Since joining Peninsula Clean Energy in 2016, Menlo Park residents and businesses have reduced greenhouse gas emissions from electricity by 96%! 

By working with Peninsula Clean Energy, we have steadily cut hundreds of thousands of metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions by using cleaner electricity. And this has been done while saving residents and businesses millions of dollars through lower electric rates!

The City of Menlo Park uses 100% renewable wind and solar to power all its municipal facilities.

2020 community benefits summary:

• $1.37 million estimated annual savings for Menlo Park customers
• 98% of electricity customers use Peninsula Clean Energy 
• 96% reduction in GHG emissions from electricity compared to 2016 
• 104,371 cumulative metric tons GHG emissions avoided since launch, equivalent to emissions from 11.7 million gallons of gas

For more information, view the Peninsula Clean Energy 2020 Community Benefits Summary for Menlo Park and the County.

In honor of California Coastal Cleanup Day, the City of Menlo Park participated in two creek clean up events in the month of September.

On September 9 and 10, Public Works staff participated in the Annual Creek Maintenance Walk, in collaboration with San Francisquito Creek Joint Powers Authority. Downed trees and debris that would inhibit water flow were identified and will be removed by mid-October. 

On September 18, in partnership with Grassroots Ecology, the Menlo Park hosted over 120 volunteers to remove litter from the creek from University Drive to Middlefield Road as part of Coastal Cleanup Day. Volunteers collected an estimated 2,400 pounds of trash. Of course, it would not be Coastal Cleanup Day without a list of odd trash finds including shopping carts, mattresses and office chairs. Thank you to all the volunteers who came out and helped keep the creek clean from debris.