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.”