Subaru of America Teams with National Park Service to Reduce Waste in Parks

The world of sustainability often is the background of some pleasantly surprising narratives. One of the latest ones goes like this: automaker helps national parks reduce their landfill waste. The protagonist of this story is automaker Subaru of America, a leader in zero landfill waste, who is now applying its expertise in this field to avoid that waste produced by visitors to some of America’s most iconic parks ends up in a landfill.

Subaru of America was the first auto assembly plant in the U.S. to achieve a zero landfill designation. Now it has teamed up with the National Park Service (NPS) to help iconic parks such as Yosemite, Grand Teton and Denali to reduce the waste produced by visitors to those famous natural landmarks, which will be the pilot parks in this collaboration.

Some sobering facts that have inspired this partnership: the human presence in those parks produces a lot of waste. Unfortunately. In 2013, alone, NPS had to manage more than 100 million pounds of waste across the country, most of which was generated by the parks’ 273.6 million visitors. The figure accounts for only the waste managed by the National Park Service and does not include the waste managed by park concessioners, which includes brands like Delaware North Companies, Grand Teton Lodge Company, Forever Resorts, and Aramark. The waste coming from those can be even higher.