Earlier this month, Recycle Utah held a couple of public presentations, outlining its plans for a $25 million recycling complex. This comes as Carolyn Wawra steps down from her role as executive director to continue her rehabilitation following a stroke last May.
Former board member Jim Bedell has been appointed General Manager and will assume most of the executive responsibilities of the organization. He said he’ll continue to work side by side with Wawra to implement a strategic plan based on a commissioned study to look at waste management and recycling across the Wasatch Back. The findings he said were disturbing.
“The most disturbing one, and the one that's become a real call to action for us, is that despite many ambitious and admirable waste diversion and zero waste goals in the community, our execution is quite poor,” Bedell said. “Our waste diversion rate is 12% in Summit County, which means roughly 88% of the total waste we create as a community goes to the landfill. National diversion rates are 32% and our mountain town peer communities are all at or above that level. So that's become a real call to action for us.”
Bedell said over the last 30 years Recycle Utah has done a good job of educating the community and encouraging people to use less products. But where they fall short is they don’t have the necessary infrastructure to manage materials.
“If you do create material and you want to keep it out of the landfill, you have to have some place to take it, and you have to be able to collect it efficiently,” he said. “And that's the primary conclusion from the study, is we just have not invested as a community in that infrastructure.”
He said Recycle Utah continues to meet with city and county officials and remains optimistic that they can push plans for a new regional collection center forward. Building the project he says is not a nonprofit’s role. He says providing waste management infrastructure is a government function.
“We need a bigger investment and a bigger facility,” he said. And that's something that we learned as a result of talking to our peer communities with our consultants, is they all invested in this a decade or so ago. So, in many ways, the solution is pretty easy for us. It requires land, it requires a building, it requires machinery, it requires a collection system. But we articulated a pretty clear plan, and we'd like to see it implemented this year.”
Recycle Utah was told years ago that it would need to move from its Woodbine Way location which is city property. Bedell said they have not yet received an eviction notice. But he knows that the property will be needed at some point for other purposes as part of the Bonanza Park redevelopment.
