Solid Waste Case Study
Petrified Forest National Park Waste Management
Often it’s the large national park operations like Yellowstone and Yosemite that have the money, staffing, and expertise to develop and implement award-winning, cutting-edge waste management programs. But environmentally speaking, “good things can come in small packages,” and one of Xanterra’s smallest operations, Painted Desert Oasis (PDO) located in a remote stretch of desert at Petrified Forest National Park, truly is an example of that. PDO takes recycling and waste management to a level possibly unseen in any national park.
The employees at PDO are the primary reason for the operation’s waste management success. They go so far as to literally count newspapers, weigh cans of recyclables daily, and record every toner cartridge or piece of electronic equipment that is sent off for recycling. And it’s not just line employees. In order to get an exact assessment of the amount of refuse being sent to the landfill in a given haul, the General Manager completed a waste audit in early 2006. As part of the audit, he literally climbed into a dumpster, removed the bags, weighed and counted each one and then returned them to the dumpster to get an exact calculation of the actual weight and volume of trash. Now that’s commitment!
One of PDO’s most significant partners has been the local Navajo Reservation. In 2002, employees began collecting food waste for the local Navajo ranchers. This “slop” is then used by the ranchers for their stock animals. Over the course of the past five years this has diverted more than 7,600 pounds of waste from the landfill; over 1,400 pounds in 2006 alone.
In 2005, PDO began purchasing “Blue Bird” flour locally grown on the same Navajo Reservation. Instead of large paper sacks, the flour is delivered in cloth bags. Once emptied, the sacks are returned to the Reservation to be refilled for the next delivery – completely eliminating a waste stream. Once the bags have lived out their useful life for flour delivery, a PDO staff member turns them into aprons for kitchen staff to wear and which are also available for sale in the on-site gift shop.
All newspaper is saved and reused to wrap fragile items visitors purchase in the gift shops. Good quality cardboard boxes are reused in the same manner.
If ever proof was needed that small steps make a big difference,the results are here. When PDO began tracking its Ecometrix waste data in 2001, the property’s diversion rate was 27 percent. By any other company or municipality standard, that diversion rate would be impressive. In 2006, PDO’s diversion rate was 76 percent and included 17 different waste streams! That could be one of the highest, if not the highest, waste diversion rates inside a national park.
All of this is in addition to PDO selling recycled content T-shirts, bulk dispensing all food condiments, using recycled content napkins, and banning all inefficient incandescent lighting and pesticide use.