Grand Canyon National Park is developing a plan to eliminate single-use waste from its South Rim.
With every food service transaction, concessioners at the Arizona park distribute about eight single-use foodware items, leading to more than seven million items used per year.
Upstream Solutions won a $400,000 grant from the National Park Service and National Park Foundation to develop an initiative to reduce, reuse and recycle foodware items that would otherwise simply become trash.
“The goal is to create a system that will benefit Grand Canyon National Park’s South Rim and nearby communities by collecting, washing, and redistributing durable, reusable foodware at concessioner sites, to ensure reusable items are used again and again,” said Upstream Solutions, which is working in partnership with Delaware North and Xanterra Travel Collection.
This is part of a broader goal to phase out single-use plastics at all national parks by 2032. Currently, visitors to national parks generate about 70 million tons of trash each year, according to the National Park Service.
