Environmentality & Sustainability - Week 2

In  Week 2 of my Environmentality & Sustainability class, we talked all about the Reedy Creek Improvement District with a special focus on recycling in the parks. For those of you who don't know what Reedy Creek is, it's a special district set up to provide services to the Walt Disney World Resort and surrounding areas, because at the time that WDW was built, neither Orange nor Osceola county had the services needed to provide the land with power and water. Disney pays Reedy Creek directly for its services (as well as taxes to Orange and Osceola counties), and Reedy Creek has a special relationship with the Disney company which makes them able to work well together. Reedy Creek provides power, water, roadways, fire emergency, and emergency medical services, as well as many other things to Disney. We watched a video about RCID and learned about the different jobs that people have there (they are not Disney Cast Members).

After learning about RCID, we had a guest speaker come talk to us about recycling in the Magic Kingdom. He has a unique job in that he is the only Cast Member with his title. I don't remember his exact job title, but it was something like Recycling Coordinator at the Magic Kingdom. I found it really interesting that the Magic Kingdom is the only park that has a coordinator of recycling. It seems like something that could easily be added to the other parks and make an even bigger impact on Disney's conservation and sustainability efforts, but he did let us know that it is something they are looking into. He let us know that there is so much contamination that goes into the recycling bins at the parks, and its his team's job to go through and separate the trash from the recycling and make sure that it all gets to Reedy Creek. So, that's something to think about the next time you visit a Disney park; bottles and cans get recycled, everything else gets thrown away unless otherwise specified!

I'm really looking forward to class next week, as we have class at Animal Kingdom in Rafiki's Conservation Station. This is something that is completely up my alley, and I think it's going to be a unique and extremely interesting class!