How Disney Turns Junk into Useful Products
What do you do with your empties?
In college, one of the sounds I remember hearing the most was beer bottles clinking around in a giant trash bag as some poor sap cleaned up after a party.
As adults, many of us have graduated to wine, which leaves even bigger empty bottles as trash.
Well, Disney has turned your trash into its treasure thanks to some creative thinking.
Here are a few ways that Disney turns junk into useful products.
Recycling Wine Bottles
Would You Drink Wine from the sand? Your answer is yes, whether you realize it or not.
I say this because the average wine bottle comes from glass, and the Breaking Bad crew may understand the chemistry here.
Manufacturers of wine bottles perform a simple chemical procedure to turn sand into glass.
You must melt sand (!) to turn it into glass, and that’s only possible at temperatures above 3090 degrees Fahrenheit.
For comparison, a fireplace generally reached temperatures of around 500-1,500 degrees Fahrenheit.
To melt sand, you’d need something twice as hot as that. So, it’s a process.
That knowledge makes tossing a wine bottle that much sadder since so much was involved in its creation.
The geniuses at Disney hated how many wine bottles they were trashing and came up with an inventive solution.
Disney de-glasses its wine bottles, reducing them back to their natural state of sand.
An empty wine bottle does nobody any good. With sand, you can fill the bottom of a pool, patch a road, or add to a beach.
You can even create a softer walking trail for horses at Disney’s Fort Wilderness Campground!
Howdy! This is no ordinary horse trail at #Disney’s Fort Wilderness. These horses are walking on pulverized glass! Recently, I had a chance to check out this new pilot project at #DisneyWorld. Follow along! pic.twitter.com/lwPCTQopvX
— Jerry Hume (@JerryHume) March 1, 2023
Remarkably, those horses are really walking on crushed glass!
Disney utilizes a pulverizer to smash the wine bottles into gravel and sand-like materials.
The entire process makes me feel terrible about all those bags of empties we trashed back in the day.
By the way, Disney attempts this process with all forms of glass now, not just wine bottles!
Recycling Soap and Costumes
You may be surprised to learn that Disney has embarked on a global initiative, not one exclusive to the United States.
In fact, Disneyland Paris aggressively attempts to reduce waste in two distinct areas.
Park officials and hotel management recognized that guests at Disneyland Paris tend to waste an excessive amount of soap.
In April 2022, the park teamed up with SapoCycle, a non-profit organization, to combat this waste.
When soap finishes its life cycle, which is to say people stop using it, SapoCycle reclaims the soap and repurposes it.
The company recycles this soap and then provides it to houses in the French countryside.
After only a year, Disneyland Paris has already collected 2.5 metric tons of soap.
Thanks to the recycling process, more than 5,600 French households have used soap that would have otherwise gone in the trash at Disneyland Paris.
This recycling system proved so successful that park officials doubled down on the premise in April 2023.
Now, Disneyland Paris turns a negative into a positive with its costumes.
Anyone who has worn a work costume for any length of time understands that they deteriorate over time.
Throwing away broken costumes is a fact of life in the entertainment industry.
Well-worn and/or damaged costumes don’t look fancy enough.
Historically, Disney would have trashed these costumes the instant they lost their luster.
Now, the Parisian park takes a different approach. It deconstructs the costumes and recycles them into insulating wire or felt.
Through this approach, the junk that would have gone in the garbage can find new life as useful materials.
While the program is still new, Disneyland Paris estimates that it will recycle 50,000 costumes annually!
Repurposing Food Waste
I don’t want to bum you out, but the strange imbalances in society somehow allow for two divergent realities.
Some people worry about where they’ll get their next meal.
Meanwhile, Feeding America suggests that “19 billion pounds of food is wasted in the United States each year.
Friends, that’s 130 billion meals of unused food. And Disney knows that’s not acceptable.
Since hundreds of thousands of people visit Disney theme parks each day, its leadership has committed to preventing as much food waste as possible.
A Disney Parks Blog post last year underscored the importance of this attempt. We’ll start with this delightful TikTok:
@disneyparks From farm to fork, to food bank and beyond! 🌱🍴#DisneyPlanetPossible #Disney #DisneyParks #EcoFriendly #EarthMonth #Sustainability #FoodWaste
As the video indicates, Disney starts the process by estimating how much food it’ll need to serve at its parks each week.
An accurate prediction dramatically reduces the potential for wasted food…and Disney does that right off the bat!
Simultaneously, Disney grows much of its food on site, with this bit of vertical integration further lessening waste.
Local Food Banks
When food excess occurs – and it’s unavoidable in modern society – Disney packs unused products to donate to local food banks.
Thus far, Disney has donated more than 2.1 million meals to food banks through this process, which it calls “farm to fork to food bank.”
Disney also composts much of its unused food to start the cycle anew.
You can do your part to help as well. When you’re at Disney, when you have food left on your plate, dump it into the compost receptacle rather than the trash bin.
Disney has added these receptacles at many Quick Service restaurants.
Also, at Table Service restaurants, it has trained cast members to do the same when they’re bussing tables.
These changes have helped Disney become more efficient in managing food waste since 2020.
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Feature Photo: Disney Parks Blog