Salt Lake City Trash Trucks to Spread Prevention Message

"Alcohol can trash your kid’s brain." That is the message newly wrapped garbage trucks from Salt Lake City and Salt Lake County will bear as they travel throughout the community everyday. The effort is part of statewide campaign to educate the community about the dangerous effects that underage drinking can have on the developing brain—and marks the first time Salt Lake City area garbage trucks have been used to display drug abuse prevention messages.

Local figures show that underage drinking continues to be a major challenge for prevention leaders in Salt Lake City and Salt Lake County. According to the data, binge drinking often begins as early as the 6th grade, 12 percent of 8th graders drank in the last 30 days and 18 percent of 12th graders binged on alcohol in the last month. To address this critical public health issue, Salt Lake City and Salt Lake County will plaster 50 garbage trucks with signs to raise awareness about the adverse health effects of underage drinking. Click here for a picture of one of the trucks.

“Garbage trucks roll through every neighborhood in the Salt Lake Valley,” said Larry V. Lunt, Chairman of the Utah Alcoholic Beverage Control Commission, who together with the Salt Lake City Mayor's Coalition on Alcohol, Tobacco and Other Drugs, MADD Utah and the State Department of Substance Abuse and Mental Health helped unveil the initiative this week. “By wrapping these trucks with the message that alcohol can trash kids’ futures, it’s like a billboard that stops in front of your home, pauses, moves on, and then comes back in a week. It’s a way that’s never been used before to convey a very important message.”

Emerging brain research demonstrates that underage drinking has severe, alarming effects on teen brain development. According to research compiled by the American Medical Association, adolescent drinkers scored worse than non-users on vocabulary, general information, and memory tests; perform worse in school; and are more likely to fall behind and have an increased risk of social problems, depression, suicidal thoughts, and violence. In addition, brain imaging data show that young people from 14-21 who abuse alcohol have 10 percent smaller hippocampi, areas of the brain that are critical for learning and memory.

Abbie Vianes, Coordinator of the Salt Lake City Mayor's Coalition on Alcohol, Tobacco and Other Drugs, said the billboard campaign is an effective way to reach thousands of people right at their homes. “Our trucks are like roving billboards; they will stop in front of
55,000 city households and businesses and 71,000 county households and businesses once a week for the next 26 weeks. That is a heavy saturation of our message in the community and something that can be replicated anywhere,” Vianes said.

The billboards are part of a much larger statewide campaign, known as ParentsEmpowered.org, that seeks to educate parents about the effect on developing brains of drinking. ParentsEmpowered funded the project, which cost $30,000 to wrap 50 trucks on both sides.

To learn more about how The Salt Lake City Mayor’s Coalition on Alcohol, Tobacco and Other Drugs implemented the initiative, contact Abbie Vianes at Abbie.Vianes@slcgov.com. For more information about the billboard artwork, visit the R&R Partners Web site.