Sustainability Lessons from the National Parks

In my previous article I discussed sustainability and defined it as the ability to use the available natural resources in a manner that maintains harmony between humans and nature which enables the use of these resources for present and future generations.  What better place to see the harmony between people and nature than a national park?  I recently visited Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks.   The beauty of this part of the world was unlike anything I have ever seen—the geothermal features, the mountains, the canyons, waterfalls and the wildlife.   It was an amazing trip!

While traveling through the parks it was evident that sustainability was at the forefront of the NPS commitments.   I was very impressed with this having worked in the manufacturing industry for over ten years and often having difficulty obtaining commitment for sustainability projects.  Considering the number of visitors to the park, I anticipated less commitment than industries that have direct control over their footprint but this assumption was incorrect.

There are just a few key principles that I extracted from their programs:

1.    Do what you can.  During my visit I learned that there are 3 million visitors to Yellowstone and 4 million visitors to Grand Teton Parks annually.  While the NPS and Xanterra cannot prevent the visitors from generating waste they do as much as possible to reduce the amount of waste generated and have programs in place to recycle or compost much of what is generated.  In fact, they manage to recycle, compost or divert 47% of waste generated (this figure does not only include the parks I visited).   In our sustainability efforts there may be waste streams that cannot be eliminated, however can we find ways to divert, recycle and/or compost these materials to keep them out of our local landfills?

2.     Partner with Others.  While walking through the parks I noticed that the NPS works with a number of strategic partners to meet its sustainability goals.   Most companies used by the NPS have sustainability goals of their own (i.e. GreenPath, Delaware North and Yellowstone Association).  A couple examples of these partnerships and their resulting projects include:

• Clean Cities Coalition:  This program includes public and private stakeholders that support the use of alternative and cleaner fuels.  Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks are converting boilers and generators to use renewable fuels and working to create a shuttle service.  The latter is very important because the size of the park dictates that most visitors use cars to travel through it, a shuttle service will significantly reduce carbon emissions.
• Automobile Companies:  Toyota has donated Prius hybrids and Dodge has donated trucks that run on 100% biofuel to assist with reducing emissions from transportation through the park by employees.
• Unilever:  The hydrothermal activity in Yellowstone makes the surrounding terrain unstable and the park has created a number of boardwalks.  The boardwalks were obtained through a Unilever donation of 750,000 square-feet of sustainable lumber resulting from the recycling of plastic bottles from the products this company sells.

While many businesses may not experience donations from Toyota, Dodge or Unilever each business has stakeholders with which they can partner.   Does your business have a contract company managing its cafeteria or janitorial services?  Then composting and greener cleaning chemicals may be options for sustainable projects.  Maximize the businesses with which your company works to create projects that provide results to each participant.

3.     Be Intentional and Innovative.  There are a number of ongoing projects that meet Xanterra and NPS goals of sustainability.  It is obvious that a significant amount of resources were invested to plan them.  In our sustainability efforts we have to dedicate resources to innovate ways of reducing our environmental impacts and often the best way to do that is to benchmark and collaborate.  Xanterra created the term “ecometabolism” to measure their sustainability efforts–it is a normalization of the company’s environmental impact per unit product.   Many company’s have performed this type of normalization but I found it fascinating that Xanterra coined the term to add innovation to their efforts and makes things more interesting.

Sustainability is not only a hot topic, there are real results that can be seen through these efforts. Take a look at the Xanterra report below–it may spark some innovation and please share your feedback in the comments section.

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