Walt Disney World.
It’s large and it’s full of people.
According to the Reedy Creek Improvement District, which is the governing jurisdiction that makes
up Walt Disney World, the area can see as many as 250k people a day across the entire property.
That’s a lot of people, and people produce garbage and so naturally, that’s also a
lot of garbage.
But just how much garbage is produced at Walt Disney World?
I don’t want to bury the lead so let’s just dive into the numbers.
According to the Reedy Creek Improvement District utilities report, the district picked up a
total of 161,000 tons of waste in 2017.
That averages out to 441 tons of trash every single day.
Now that’s a lot of garbage, but how does that break down, and how do they manage it?
Well for one, not all waste is equal.
The district breaks down waste into a few different categories, including solid waste
(your general garbage), food waste, landscape waste, manure, and recyclables.
They’re all collected and managed separately.
Now the solid waste makes up the lion’s share, with it accounting for just over 110,000
tons of the 161,000 total while 12.7 thousand tons are comprised of loose and bailed recyclables.
However the number that surprised me the most wasn’t how much garbage was being produced,
but how often it was being trucked off.
Because, you see, in 2017 there were an average of 191 waste pickups per day, every day.
Keep in mind, those pickups aren’t the times a custodial cast member is emptying a trash
can on Main Street.
We’re talking about the number of times trucks from Reedy Creek’s fleet of 35 solid
waste transfer vehicles loaded up on garbage and whisked it off to a processing facility.
Spread out evenly, that would be a pickup roughly every seven and a half minutes.
Of course in order for the trucks to pick up that garbage it first needs to be collected,
and I’d be remiss to make a video about garbage at Disney without talking about the
novel and, for some, famous way it’s moved around at the Magic Kingdom: tubes.
When the Magic Kingdom opened in 1971, one of the many improvements it made over Disneyland
was the inclusion of an underground pneumatic tube system called the Automated Vacuum Collection
system, or AVAC for short.
It’s comprised of nearly two miles of tubing that was installed to transport garbage from
point A to point B. It cost Disney a reported one-million dollars at the time of its installation
and it allowed cast members to drop off garbage at 16 different collection points across the
park, where it would then be moved to a central collection point.
That wouldn’t be the last time Disney experimented with new ways to collect trash either.
Just back in 2016 Disney piloted a program in which sensors were placed in garbage bins.
When the bins were about three quarters of the way full, it would alert the custodial
cast members nearby so that it could be emptied and replaced with a new bag.
So with all that trash moving around and being collected every day, amounting to 161,000
tons a year, it must be make for an unusually high amount of garbage, right?
Well, surprisingly that isn’t the case.
According to the EPA, here in the United States we produce about 4.4 pounds of garbage per
day per capita.
By comparison, Disney’s per capita garbage production is 3.5 pounds per day, undercutting
the national average by almost a full pound.
And really, if you think about it that makes sense.
While there’s plenty of waste involved in the process of making, selling, and eating
food, there aren’t a ton of opportunities outside of that for most guests to create
garbage.
Most people buying merch, at least the kind with a lot of packaging, are waiting until
they’re home to open it and considering the largest type of garbage produced by households
is in the form of packaging, that cuts out a large portion.
That said, we could still do better.
The United States generates more garbage per capita than any other nation on Earth.
Disney, like many, has explored new ways to deal with garbage outside of just traditional
recycling and trying to cut down on waste production.
For instance almost all of its food waste is now sent to a special plant that breaks
it down and converts it to energy.
I have a whole video about that if you’re interested.
161,000 tons of garbage.
It’s yet another another number that just drives home how much Disney World is like
a fully functioning small city, and why it takes the workforce of one to make the dream
of the parks a reality.