Japan’s Subaru helps waste management in US national parks

Three national parks in the US are getting help in waste management practices from Subaru, Japan’s 7th largest automaker.
Subaru is a subsidiary of Fuji Heavy Industries (FHI), an engineering conglomerate partially owned by Toyota.

Japanese manufacturers began developing zero landfill technologies in the 1990s, both for use in Japan and also at their overseas factories.

In 2004, Subaru of Indiana became the first manufacturing facility in the United States to reach zero-landfill status. Continued R&D has led to solutions that are applicable outside the automobile industry.

According to the National Parks Service (NPS), more than 100m pounds of waste were generated in National Parks in 2013, with most of it coming from the 273m annual park visitors.

However, this figure only covers waste managed by the NPS, not the larger amount generated by park concessioners, which provide food services, lodging, transportation, retail shops, and other amenities.

Subaru has been a leader in zero landfill practices for more than a decade and makes its zero landfill expertise available to other companies and organizations wishing to upgrade their waste management.

The NPS zero landfill pilot project includes Yosemite, Grand Teton, and Denali National Parks, which had more than 7m visitors in 2013, generating some 16.6m pounds of waste from visitors.

Representatives from the NPS, the National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA), the National Park Foundation (NPF), and concessioners from the three parks, visited Subaru of Indiana Automotive, Inc.

They learned about Subaru’s zero landfill best practices and worked with sustainability experts at Subaru to identify waste management challenges and opportunities present at each location.

A team from Subaru then visited each pilot park to help with assessing current practices and introduce ideas to help meet zero landfill goals at the parks.

The NPCA will conduct a baseline waste audit for each park. It will review current practices for composting, recycling, hazardous waste management, as well as explore “visitor waste behaviour.” The goal is to document the current status and create zero landfill implementation plans that can be scaled to fit other national parks.

This zero landfill initiative, which has a goal of “significantly reducing waste going into landfills from all national parks,” is part of a bigger partnership between Subaru of America and the NPF, which seeks to help celebrate the 100-year anniversary of the founding of the National Park Service next year.