A pillar of Recycle Utah’s mission is education, and they’ve worked through partnerships to start at the beginning, education the next generation. 

Their programs for kids in Summit County are offered in and out of the classroom, and they educate over 5,000 elementary students a year, according to the Recycle Utah website. With curriculum designed to align with Utah Core Curriculum Standards, Recycle Utah educators visit classrooms for lessons on basic recycling, natural resources, conservation needs, alternative energy and climate change, to name a few.

Out of the classroom setting, Recycle Utah organizes summer camps and field trips through community partners like Summit Community Gardens and EATS. Camps cover topics like pollution and the benefits of buying local, and field trips include tours of the recycling center and the Three Mile Canyon Landfill. 

But what about for adults who want to keep learning well past their school and summer-camp years? That’s why Recycle Utah started their Green Drinks series, held every two months, six a year. 

“It’s our main adult education program,” said Chelsea Hafer, Recycle Utah’s community outreach manager. “Each Green Drinks, we have a different topic, and we have different speakers.”

The format is actually a national program, she explained, where an international network of people who work in the environmental field meet up at informal sessions in their cities. A simple website lists the locations around the world where these meetings are met and also provides resources for new people to launch a Green Drinks series.

The concept began in 1989 at an England pub when two eco-conscious parties met by happenstance, pushed their tables together and began chatting, according to the Green Drinks website. Edwin Datschefski, one of the pub attendees and an employee at The Environment Council, built a website in 2001 in his spare time, and it has since spread.

“I think the strangest thing about Green Drinks is that the goals are so vague and the benefits hard to quantify — but they are undoubtedly there,” Datschefski writes on the site. “When you have seen people come and make new links and learn and argue and set up new schemes and get new jobs etc, it is a good feeling.” 

He explains the concept he created as biological because it is distributed, viral and adaptive: having no central organization, spread by word-of-mouth and different based on each city. 

Mary Closser, Recycle Utah’s education director, started the Park City “chapter” of Green Drinks in 2021 with its bimonthly, second-Tuesday-of-the-month format.

“Depending on the topic, there will be speakers. Some of them are more like a presentation format, and some of them are more like tabling,” said Hafer.

The ad hoc structure is the beauty of Green Drinks, and one way Recycle Utah organizes theirs is by hosting the events at Summit County Green Businesses.

Recycle Utah initiated the Green Business program in 2016, and the group has since grown to over 30 members. It’s a point system for measuring the eco-conscious practices at a business, Hafer said, with three designated levels achieved through green actions. The action categories are energy, water conservation, materials management, transportation and thriving community and equity. 

This program is now a joint effort of Recycle Utah, Park City Municipal and Summit County Sustainability teams, the Park City Chamber of Commerce and Utah Clean Energy, Hafer said. They’re also currently in the process of restructuring and relaunching the program.

One of the already-appointed green businesses is Este Pizza Park City, which is where the next Green Drinks event on Tuesday, Sept. 10, will meet. With a focus on waste, speakers include Tim Loveday, Summit County’s landfill manager, Andy Hecht, the Park City Community Foundation climate fund manager, and Wasatch Resource Recovery, Hafer said.

“The landfill filling up, we talk about it every time we teach kids, and I think it’s a really important thing for people to know about because it’s a very big issue in our county,” Hafer said. “So Time Loveday was an obvious pick (for a speaker).” 

The topic of waste will of course discuss the landfill and ways to lessen the loads taken there.

“Thirty percent of the landfill is organic, including cardboard, that could be diverted,” Hafer said. “In Park City there’s a big movement towards diverting food waste as the first choice because I think a lot of people, hopefully, recycle and know the rules about curbside recycling. Food waste is a lot of what is taking up volume in the landfill, that’s why the Community Foundation has their Zero Food Waste goal.”

All these issues, and possible solutions, will be discussed during the Sept. 10 event, held from 5:30-7 p.m. It’s a slight deviation from their usual 6-8 p.m. time in order to accommodate for the presidential debate, Hafer said.

“We’re going to have speakers from 6-6:45 p.m. and then Este is going to air the debate, just so that people can watch it,” she said.

There will be drinks for purchase and light appetizers available.

Park City Mountain will host the next event scheduled for Nov. 12, when topics will include “protect our winters” and “dark skies.” Tickets, which are free, for all Green Drinks events can be reserved on the Recycle Utah website at recycleutah.org/events.

“Most of the people who come come to every single one because it’s always a new topic, and people are always able to learn more. Almost all of the information is incredibly interesting,” Hafer said. “If people have not been, they definitely should come because there’s always something new to learn. I learn something new at every one.”

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The mountains of Park City donned a Pacific Northwest atmosphere the night of the ninth annual 100 Mile Meal, put on by Recycle Utah.

A key fundraiser for the recycling nonprofit, which was founded in Park City in 1991, the 100 Mile Meal serves a dinner with food grown or produced within 100 miles of the recycling center. 

This year’s dinner was held at Red Pine Lodge at Canyons Park City Mountain, which involved an aerial ride up the Red Pine Gondola. A slight thunderstorm delay didn’t dampen spirits, and the rain cleared entirely, leaving a mystical vista at 8,000 feet. The surrounding trees seemed to exhale as drifts of clouds poured from their tops, the sun burning the moisture away.

Greeted, as usual, with a glass of champagne, attendees milled around the upper level and deck of the lodge, sampling from an extensive meat and cheese board featuring Beehive Cheese, Park City Creamery and Creminelli Fine Meats. House-made cocktails — a mint mule, cucumber basil smash and a whiskey and coke — used Alpine Distilling’s gin, vodka and whiskeys, along with fruits and veggies from nearby farms.

The Park City Mountain culinary team, led by Executive Chef Greg Hansen and Food and Beverage Director Alex Malmborg, assembled the night’s menu, rising to the task.

“Being that it is from 100 miles, we do run into some challenges,” Hansen said. “We don’t have lemons or any kind of citrus here in Utah, no sugar. … So pretty much everything we use for acid is a honey vinegar or a honey.” 

Appetizers passed around delivered a range of flavors and styles: lingua empanadas, a trout cake, smoked beet tartare and stone fruit crostini.

Once seated for the meal, guests chatted with the invited contributors at their tables, the farmers, cheese-makers or ranchers who had offered their goods to the chefs. Three new contributors participated this year: Moonshadow Farm from Hoytsville, Mountain Town Farm Utah from Park City and Whistling Spring Trout Farm from Brigham City.

After a first soup course — a melon gazpacho with cantaloupe, a pork belly chicharron and garnished with a picked melon rind — Recycle Utah Board Member Ken Barfield addressed the room. 

“This is not a normal introduction. This is the leader of our family. This is the leader of our tribe,” he said, gesturing to Recycle Utah’s Executive Director Carolyn Wawra.

In early May, the young executive experienced a stroke. She returned to work in July with the support of her staff. Still recovering from the event’s side effects, Wawra addressed the crowded room unshrinking. 

“Thank you for coming and supporting the 100 Mile Meal,” she said, reading from flash cards. “My name is Carolyn. I’m executive director of Recycle Utah.”

She thanked Epic Promise and Gallery MAR for their support and said the proceeds from the event would support Recycle Utah’s mission to achieve a more sustainable community through “recycling services, education and advocacy.”

When finished, the room rose in a standing ovation, representing the love and support Wawra has earned from her community.

Dinner continued with a mushroom ravioli salad, and then the entree course was served family style. A checkered picnic basket and a bucket of fried chicken was left at the front of each table, a charming surprise for guests to unbox — tins of brisket and ribs, roasted corn and squash, smashed potatoes and jars of whipped hot honey and crispy shallots for topping.

Throughout much of the meal, produce grown by Tagge’s Famous Fruit & Veggie Farm in Perry was incorporated, including cantaloupe, peaches, sun sugar tomatoes and potatoes. The family — husband Thayne, wife Cari and kids Laci and Chad — attended the meal with an exciting announcement.

“Thayne and I are unusual farmers because we didn’t inherit our land. We bought our farm piece by piece,” Cari said.

Since they founded in 1997, they’ve watched their neighboring farms sell and get developed, which was originally their plan, she joked. But then they realized the severity of the changes: “you’re never going to take a house down and put a peach tree,” Cari said. 

“We thought, ‘we might be the last ones around with a Brigham City peach. We can’t let that happen. It’s too special.’ We feel like we’re the stewards of this,” she said. “Our land, we feel, needs to be able to go on forever. We want your grandchildren to buy Brigham City peaches.”

So, she announced, their family decided to put their 130 acres of land into a Legacy Trust. The room erupted in applause. 

“It always has to be used for farming, and it can never be developed,” she said, receiving more cheers.

On that note, dessert was served, a peach berry pie with buttermilk ice cream, from Auntie Em’s Baked Goods, Smith Orchards and Weeks Berries of Paradise, was paired with a honey apple dessert wine created by Slide Ridge from Mendon. A sweet finish for a sweet night.

Then it was back down the mountain in the dark. Overlapping with this year’s Park City Song Summit festivities, the event gave way to the sounds of musician Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats, growing louder as the gondolas descended on their performance. 

The 100 Mile Meal will return next year. Learn more about Recycle Utah on their website, recycleutah.org, and follow them on Instagram @recycleutah for updates on events.

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Recycle Utah will need to close for nearly two weeks to allow a sewer line to be connected through its site to the new Engine House housing development, according to the group.

That means nobody will be able to drop off material for recycling during the expected closed dates of August 19 through September 3.

The one exception is that there will still be two glass bins at Jeremy Park and Ride and Triumph that will remain open and serviced.

“We appreciate that our closure might cause some inconvenience to your business and we want to do all that we can to minimize this,” the group said in an email statement. “Accordingly, we’d be happy to accept whatever material you can bring to us before August 18.”

The group said they expect a significant rush once they do reopen as people may then be eager to unload a buildup of recylcables. 

“We encourage those of you with storage capacity to wait a few days before coming once we reopen so that we can accommodate those with less storage,” the statement read.

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Recycle Utah hosted their 100 Mile Meal fundraising event Saturday evening, August 12, 2017, at a private ranch near Oakley. The event featured games, live music and a five-course meal made with local foods that were sourced from within 100 miles of the recycling center in Park City. (Tanzi Propst/Park Record)

Link to full gallery here: https://parkrecordphoto.smugmug.com/PHOTOS-100-Mile-Meal/

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Recycle Utah hosted their annual Water Festival at St. Mary’s Catholic Church Thursday morning, April 27, 2017. Fourth grade students from across the county spent the day learning about the importance of water, how we can keep it clean and how we all use it in our everyday lives. (Tanzi Propst/Park Record)

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The 7th annual festival featured local food and drink, activities for kids, wagon rides, live music, local crafts, and more at the High Star Ranch in Kamas Saturday afternoon, Oct. 1, 2016. The event was free and open to the public. (Nan Chalat-Noaker/Park Record)

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