Super Eco

Photo credit: Kim Lachance Shandrow

Not quite, but it's getting there. Enough to earn some decent EPA cred, and my reluctant one and a half green thumbs mostly up.

So yesterday I descended upon The Happiest Place on Earth with with my super stoked kids, a stash of el cheapo snacks, chilled reusable water bottles and a hefty dose of skepticism. From the looks of Mass Market Mickey's souvenir-grubbing fans and confetti littered post-parade Main Street USA, I couldn't have Imagineered how much of a palm tree hugger the mouse has become.

Don't get too excited. Mickey's crib hasn't earned the title Ecoland just yet.

Upon arriving I noticed the new-ish recycling bins sprinkled throughout the park. Check. But I also couldn't help noticing a pulsing throng of shiny (sweaty), happy (except for overcooked kids having meltdowns) people brandishing brand new Disney branded stuff, stuff and more stuff ... everywhere I rubbernecked. Stuff!

Plastic souvenir cups; fluorescent flashing rubber and latex balloons; plastic pirate swords; geeky felt mouse ears; foofy polyester (flammable!) princess dresses; glow-in-the-dark plastic whatchamacallits and vibrating, gyrating thingamajigs; and the trademarked junk-made-in-China list goes on. (How about those sweatshop charges?)

Twelve hours and two kids asleep directly on the parking lot concrete later, the fantasy abruptly ended when my husband forgot where he parked the car.

My jaws were still sore this morning from repeatedly denying my children cheesy souvenirs, my hips from steamrolling through the masses with my daughter teetering on my right ilium all the while. Honestly, I was rearing to pounce on Disneyland in this post, itching to paint Anaheim's largest employer as a recklessly polluting bastion of American gluttony and manic consumerism.

But I can't.
And I won't.
Because it's not.

Well, not completely. So much for the wet blanket angle. 

No one likes a pessimist at Disneyland. Why frowning isn't even allowed there, or so I manipulatively warned my kids. Naturally I was a little disappointed when a quick Google search turned up a burgeoning, eco award-winning world of green good spilling over at Mickey's pad. What?! No patent corporate greenwashing to be found? No public relations pixie dust? How annoyingly pleasantly surprising. I'd have to bottle the piss and vinegar for another fight.

Of course I can't keep all that good green news to myself, right? So, here it is, the gist of the green, mostly clean "dirt" I dug up on Disneyland, where--Jiminy Cricket!--a shrinking environmental Mickey-print is more fact than fantasy. Ripley's Believe It Or Not!

The good:

• A fleet of eight Finding Nemo submarines runs on quiet, clean electric engines and magnetic coils. They float amid a rainbow of faux coral reef displays colored with 30 tons(!) of recycled glass sprayed on via organic epoxy.
• The cars of Main Street USA run on compressed natural gas. (The still-clomping horse-drawn streetcars are about as green as it gets. Exactly what does all that horse "waste" get upcycled into?)
• The Mark Twain Riverboat and the trams that take guests to and from area parking lots are also powered by natural gas.
• Disneyland's iconic railroad trains now chug on two percent diesel and 98 percent reclaimed soybean grease (aka B98 biodiesel), reportedly cutting CO2 emissions by up to 80 percent. Mmm. French fry oil that's sourced from the 500-acre park's Fry-O-Lators. Eco-retrofitting never smelled so good ... until you find out B98 is still classified as diesel and still releases noxious nitrogen oxide into the atmosphere.
• The belching boats of the classic Jungle Cruise ride motor on clean-burning compressed natural gas (but they sure don't sound like it). I think our guffawing Wilford Brimley lookalike captain sniffed a different kind of gas yesterday. If only he had some laughing gas left for his us, his captives.
• There are 300 plus bottle and can recycling bins within the Magic Kingdom. They're juxtaposed against garbage cans that seem to urge guests to "waste please." C'mon, Imagineers. You can slogan-ize better than that. Or, are the trash can messages intended to guilt visitors into recycling? Now that's a strategy I can get behind. Bonus: If a cast member catches you recycling, they'll give you a free Jiminy Cricket pin. Joy.
• Disnelyand "aggressively recycles" a sizable chunk of its enormous waste stream, including greenwaste, rubber, food byproducts, wood, glass, metals, plastics, corrugated packaging, paper and way too many other mouse-shaped things.
• Disneyland HR officials encourage their 20,000 cast members (Can't we just call them employees?) and the park's 15 million annual visitors to ride share. Mickey says carpool, or else!
• Disneyland Resort's trash-trimming efforts earned the adjacent mega hotel complex an EPA WaterWise Honorable Mention. Plus, the resort is decked out with furniture made from 100 percent recycled HDPE plastic.
• Had enough? No? Then check out Disney's new corporate sustainability report, which spells out the company's plans to further "reduce water use, cut waste, protect nature and head for zero-carbon emissions."

The bad:

• Disneyland visitors, millions of them who fly halfway around the world on atmosphere-killing planes to get there, chuck approximately 30 tons of trash at the park per day, according to this report. They're parched, sun-baked and willing to fork over $3 for a single plastic bottle of water ... or four or five. To offset the daily dumping deluge, Disneyland recycles an estimated 4 million pounds of cardboard, paper and other mousy schwag (see above) annually. That equals only about 2,000 tons of recycled refuse a year, a fraction of the yearly tons of trash visitors toss. To be fair, I should note that, according to Imagineering Disney eco flacks, the company, on the whole, not just at the Anaheim location, has recycled more than 850,000 tons of material since 1991. Why wouldn't they? What's good for the Earth is also good for the bottom line.
• Park restaurants serve up an estimated four million burgers, three million French fry orders, and more than one million gallons of soda every year. That leaves behind a nasty trail of of non-recyclable soiled wrappers, napkins, plastic straws and utensils, spent condiment packets and tons more. Also leftover--just scan the crowd and you'll see what I mean--an awful lot of spare tires and leaky muffin tops, too. (Healthier, more affordable Disneyland eats are the subject of another post altogether. God, how I love those triple-dipped corn dogs, though.)

The ugly (but not for long?):

• The Chevron cars of Autopia, Disneyland's decades-old "testament to America's auto fixation," still round the track on gasoline. They were recently retrofitted with new engines and pedal starters to reduce idling and CO2 emissions by two-thirds. The move was a still-polluting step up (or sideways?) from the smoggy old lawn mower engines that used to power them. Rumors are revving that the fossil fuel burning Autopia fleet with eventually be upstaged by fuel cell powered vehicles.
• More than 400 personal items are collected by Disneyland's Lost and Found depot every single day. That's a grip of lost whatever. Some of it's got be ugly. I mean, have you ever seen a beautiful fanny pack? Seriously.

So, is Disneyland a green, green world after all? I suppose if you look at it as a happy, trippy, increasingly sustainable microcosm of our consumer culture consumed country, well, it's not a shabby start. Dizzying, but not a bad example in terms of environmental ambitions. But that's my opinion. Then again, I'm just a 33-year-old kid who's still afraid to ride a roller coaster. 

This writer says it's all greenwashed Imagineering. What do you think?