Find Your Park on August 25th

Even if you're not a Subaru owner or fan, you've probably heard by now that Subaru will be helping the National Park Service with their trash problem. Subaru's U.S. auto plant, Subaru of Indiana Automotive, Inc., has become well known for their environmental conservation practices ever since becoming the first U.S. auto plant to achieve zero-landfill status in 2004, and now Subaru is going to help bring those practices to the National Park Service.

It seems hard to believe that a network of parks designed to protect and showcase the natural beauty of the United States would have a trash problem, but it most certainly does. In 2013, the national parks across the country had a combined 273.6 million visitors. Of course, those visitors aren't sneakily plotting to build mountains of waste in landfills, but with that many people entering the parks, even the smallest contributions to a trash can adds up, and those 273.6 million visitors collectively generated more than 100 million pounds of waste. 

That's quite a large footprint for a system of parks designed to celebrate nature, but it's not that people are scheming to fill up landfills, wearing sinister grins with each candy bar wrapper they place in a trash bin. Traffic to national parks has been increasing while funding has decreasing, making it difficult for the National Park Service to handle the volume of visitors on a number of different levels. 

So on the cusp of the National Park Service’s centennial, Subaru has offered to help reduce that 100 million pounds of waste to a more manageable number. That number being zero, to be exact.

Earlier this year, representatives from the National Park Service and the National Parks Conversation Association toured the Subaru plant in Indiana and worked on strategies to make Yosemite, Grand Teton, and Denali zero-landfill. 

Our national parks are important, and we have to do what we can to take care of them. This August 25^th is the National Park Service's 99^th birthday, and they're celebrating by letting visitors in free of charge! Take this opportunity to see what makes our parks so great!