Green Tip #96: Disney World, Part 3!

Happy Friday everyone!! Let's celebrate by talking about the final Disney Green Tip! It's been a good run while it lasted, but all good things must come to an end some day. And that day is today...

Anyway, this one will be a lesson not so much in what Disney World is doing right for the environment, but what we as consumers should be doing more of to help Disney World do the right thing. One of the things that I noticed while I was there was that many of the rides and attractions had open seats in them. But the thing is that most of those rides and attractions went on anyway even with those open seats. Normally this wouldn't bother me, but I started thinking about it and I realized that we were causing Disney to be less environmentally friendly by our actions.

Let me explain. These Disney rides will be running all day (during park hours) whether we are riding on them or not. And during that time that those cars are traveling along through a world filled with robotic ghosts or while the boats are floating passed little animatronic highly stereotyped dancing people, the same amount of energy is being used when we're on the ride as when we're not (probably a little more energy when we're on it because the motors have to work harder to pull our weight.) So the overall energy used by each ride is roughly the same from day to day. The number of riders, however, changes during the busy season and during the weekday versus the weekend. So the average energy used per visitor is lower during the busy seasons and higher during the off season.

What does this all mean for you? Well Green Tip #96 is this: Go to Disney World. We need to make sure that there are no empty cars on any of these rides, otherwise Disney World is wasting all that electricity just to push empty cars around. So fill those seats and make sure to have an amazing time saving the environment!!