Message from the President & CEO
 Between April and August 2010, an estimated 185 million gallons of thick, black crude oil — 10 times more than the Exxon Valdez oil spill — gushed into the Gulf of Mexico from BP’s Deepwater Horizon drilling rig. This tragic spill may be one of the worst environmental catastrophes in human history.
Fifteen months earlier, outside of Knoxville, Tennessee, a mountain of toxic coal ash sludge at a Tennessee Valley Authority power plant burst from a dam, spilling 5.4 million cubic yards of ash on 300 acres of homes and into a river.
While it’s true that responsibility for these spills rests with mega-corporations BP and TVA, aren’t all of us, to a very small extent, accomplices in these “environmental crimes,” due to our insatiable appetite for those very same fossil fuels to power our homes, cars, and businesses?
This report is about Xanterra’s attempts — some successful and some failed — to find ways to reduce our fossil fuel consumption and associated carbon footprint, doing our part to indirectly prevent future environmental catastrophes.
Xanterra’s vision is simple: provide quality services to visitors to our parks and resorts in the most sustainable ways possible, while maintaining profitability. Our 2015 Environmental Vision goals articulate how this vision relates to energy, carbon emissions, waste, sustainable design, sustainable foods, transportation, and water.
Since our last report, we’ve made significant progress:
• We developed a retail store with a conscience, For Future Generations: Yellowstone Gifts, dedicated to selling environmentally preferable items and interpreting climate change. Through a first-of-its-kind product sustainability scorecard, the store educates visitors about the threats climate change poses to our national parks and helps guests make sustainable consumer choices.
• We retrofitted our inefficient and polluting diesel-powered steam locomotives at Grand Canyon Railway to run on clean-burning, 100 percent waste vegetable oil (operating 5-7 days per year). Train enthusiasts ask us, “Where’s the black smoke?” We even harvest rain water on site for the steam, saving 11,000 gallons of potable water per trip.
• To reduce plastic water bottle waste at Zion, we completely banned the sale of bottled water and installed hydration stations for guests to use with reusable bottles.
• In Death Valley, we installed our fifth and largest solar photovoltaic (PV) system to date, a 1.23 MW (DC) system that generates enough electricity to power 100 percent of the resort during the day (35 percent year round) – more than
2.3 million kWh per year for the next 50 years.
• At Yellowstone, instead of shipping waste vegetable oil off site, we now plumb it directly to boilers to heat buildings.
• To help protect views at the Grand Canyon, we have made great strides in phasing out all old diesel-powered buses with new clean-burning, propane-powered buses.
• We have installed our first wind turbine at Maumee Bay State Park. This turbine will generate 17,000 kWh of clean renewable energy per year for the next 40 years.
• We replaced all in-room amenities (soaps, lotions, shampoos) that formerly were in plastic bottles with environmentally preferable items in biodegradable corn starch containers.
• Nearly all of our cleaning products are now Green Seal certified as environ¬mentally preferable.
• We continue to find creative ways to
support the National Park Foundation, having raised more than $1.7 million in the last eight years.
After more than a decade of data gathering and tracking, we now have third-party audited internal Ecometrix data that documents our environmental performance. With this assurance, I trust that our trends are accurate and our results conclusive:
• Absolute greenhouse gas emissions are down 20.9 percent since 2000. Accounting for acquisitions and divestitures, our emissions “Ecometabolism” (our impact normalized for revenue) is still down 19.3 percent over the same period.
• Renewable energy now provides 14.1 percent of companywide electricity.
• Our companywide solid waste diversion rate is 47 percent (56 percent at national parks). Our recycling Ecometabolism (waste diverted per room night) went from 2.3 to 9.2 pounds.
• We generate 32 percent less solid waste than we did ten years ago (from 14.1 million to 9.6 million pounds).
• Our sustainable cuisine purchases have increased from $1.4 million in 2004 to $5.7 million in 2009, now totaling 19.6 percent of all food purchases. To take sustainable food to the next level, at two locations we constructed greenhouses on site and began growing our own vegetables and serving them to guests. No fossil fuels are used in shipping, no trees are used in packaging, and, of course, everything is organic and fresh.
But our progress hasn’t come without its share of failures. We had two minor waste¬water spills in two years at Death Valley. We were unable to install renewable micro-hydro energy systems in two parks.
In 2008, Xanterra was purchased by Philip Anschutz Company, owned by Philip Anschutz. One of the first things Mr. Anschutz did was clarify his support for our culture of sustainability. In fact, in 2008 he even asked Xanterra’s environmental affairs team to assist one of his companies, Anschutz Entertainment Group (AEG), with its environmental programs. Over the last two years, Xanterra has assisted AEG in developing environmental management systems, Ecometrics tracking systems, policies, programs, and a sustainability report.
Still, if every business in the world did everything we’re doing, the state of our planet and its ecosystems would still be in decline. Just reducing the environmental impact of business on the planet is simply not enough. The very foundation of how business works must drastically change in a way that makes environmental protection, even restoration, profitable.
That is no easy task. But we aim to challenge conventional economic wisdom with creativ¬ity, ingenuity, and relentless effort toward innovation in environmentally sustainable business systems. This includes disclosing to consumers the environmental impacts of their purchasing decisions while still in¬creasing sales, developing on-site renewable energy systems that quickly pay for them¬selves, heating buildings with what was formerly a waste product, and growing food on site to improve quality and save money.
We will continue to ask ourselves with everything we do: “Is there a better, cleaner, more efficient, restorative, renewable, and profitable way?” Hopefully, the result will be fewer crude oil and coal ash spills, a stable climate, and cleaner air, water and food for us and future generations.
As has been said many times before, “the economy is the wholly owned subsidiary of the environment.” Thus, we can’t be economically viable without being ecologically stable.
This is the thesis of the modern environ¬mental movement. We aim to be among its leaders
Andrew N. Todd
President & CEO
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