- [Male Announcer] Growing a Greener World is made possible in part by: - [Female Announcer]: so you can roam the Earth with a lighter footprint.

- [Male Announcer] And the following: [gentle instrumental music] - [voice-over] I'm Joe Lamp'l.

When I created Growing a Greener World, I had one goal.

To tell stories of everyday people.

Innovators, entrepreneurs, forward-thinking leaders who are all, in ways both big and small, dedicated to organic gardening and farming, lightening our footprint, conserving vital resources, protecting natural habitats, making a tangible difference for us all.

They're real, they're passionate, they're all around us.

They're the game changers who are literally growing a greener world and inspiring the rest of us to do the same.

Growing a Greener World.

It's more than a movement, it's our mission.

[peaceful music] ♪ - [Joe] Denali National Park and Preserve, the centerpiece of the Alaskan frontier.

Six million acres of awe-inspiring wilderness, home to mighty mountain peaks, diverse terrain ranging from spruce forest to tundra, and a seemingly endless list of exotic wild animals in their natural habitat.

Majestic, unspoiled, pure.

[peaceful music] But with millions of visitors annually making the trek here to Denali, there's also the monumental challenge of what to do with the abundance of waste they bring with them and leave behind, but the National Park Service has taken on an incredible goal that will leave a dramatically lighter footprint on our country's most treasured pieces of land.

Today, we'll follow along in their footsteps for an Alaskan adventure to turn the land of the midnight sun into the land of zero waste.

[birds chirping] [peaceful music] - [Don] You'll see as you go out on your visits around the park, it's just big.

I mean, everything is epic.

The mountain is big, the landscapes are big as you're looking around and you just move from one epic view to another to another, and it just goes on and on.

It's wonderful, it's amazing.

- [Joe] Does the name Denali signify something specific?

- In Athabascan, Denali is the high one or the great one.

That's how folks back then referred to the big mountain.

- [Joe] The big mountain is not easy to spot all the time, right?

It's like the exception.

- Well, not in the summer.

Probably one out of three days you see part of the mountain.

Not only does she create her own weather so as the day goes on she tends to get sort of socked in, at least on high, but you know just with the normal summer hazes, it can be more of a challenge, and then you have things like smoke from fires, which we have a few fires going now.

But I'll tell you this, come in March.

Like so many other parks, the park is completely different in the winter than in the summer, and the March experience is unbelievable.

If you like Denali in the summer, you will love Denali in March and you have this amazing light, the mountain's out almost everyday, and it's just superb, especially for folks who like to take photography, or take a dog team and go out in the park.

- [Joe] Is there a lot of snow still in March I would think?

- [Don] Oh yes.

[man laughs] Oh yes, but the grizzly bears are asleep.

[peaceful music] - [Joe] Denali reminds you at nearly every turn that you are in mother nature's territory here, and that makes it all the more jarring when you happen to see something that just doesn't belong like litter on a hiking trail, or an overflowing trash can.

Over the years, as more and more people have come to explore the raw wilderness of this part of Alaska and turn Denali into a tourist destination, over 600,000 visitors in 2017 alone, an excess of waste has become a real problem.

- In a place like Denali National Park and Preserve though, most of the waste that we're generating is not generated by the employees or by the concessions inside the park.

It's generated outside of the park and brought into the park.

Where you might think, you're Alaska, you've got plenty of places to put landfills.

Who cares if you fill up the landfill?

Go dig another one.

When I use up that landfill, what's the cost of the replacement landfills?

- But with six million acres to keep clean, a few recycling bins at the visitor's center wouldn't be enough.

Denali would need help.

In 2016, that help came from a seemingly unlikely place.

It came from an auto manufacturer, Subaru.

Full disclosure, Subaru is a funder of Growing a Greener World, but after converting one of their assembly plants into a zero landfill facility, they thought those same basic concepts would work with our country's national parks to help them with their growing waste problem.

And the zero landfill initiative was born.

It's a pilot program that belongs to the parks with a little corporate help from someone who's done it.

The program launched here in Denali, in Yosemite National Park in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California, and in Wyoming's Grand Teton National Park.

It's basic reduce, reuse, and recycle, but on an utterly epic scale, one program being implemented across 11,000 square miles of land.

The goal of the zero landfill initiative, exactly what the name says, to add nothing from those parks to America's landfills, or as close to nothing as possible.

[peaceful music] The program, now in its third year, has been a huge undertaking.

It's caused Denali National Park and Preserve to completely rethink the way their employees and onsite vendors operate, and it's trickled out to the local community and area businesses, but it's also required a massive effort to educate the park's visitors.

The hashtag don't feed the landfills was born on social media.

The idea being to reach visitors before they get to the park, but there are also boots on the ground inside the park too.

Justin and Patrice LaVine are a husband and wife team better known as the leave no trace zero landfill team, full-time ambassadors who spread the word one park visitor at a time.

- We kind of talk about the decomposition process and we have different products on the table and little tidbits about how long things take to break down and that always surprises people.

- It draws the people right in.

We have a plastic bottle right there.

How long does it take this plastic bottle to break back down into the soil?

It never does.

We have a tin can sitting there.

A tin can, 50 years.

An aluminum can, 80 to 100 years.

A disposable diaper, there are a lot of children out there.

You wanna take a guess how long?

Take a guess.

- 150 years.

- 450 years for a diaper to break back down into the Earth.

- Maybe I should think about not using a plastic water bottle.

Maybe I should think about really focusing on using my reusable water bottle because reduction is the first step to really helping this.

- It really makes us feel good that we can see people, that we're making a difference.

People a lot of times say, I'm only one person, it doesn't make a big deal, but it does make a big deal 'cause that one person really can change the pattern for everyone else.

- It doesn't seem like much, but to be honest, it wouldn't take much to make a huge difference.

The national parks saw over 300 million visitors last year and if 300 million people brought their own coffee mug, or a reusable water bottle, or their own bags, they could fill the Washington Monument 1,100 times and it would not take away from their experience in the parks whatsoever nor would it require hardly any extra effort, but it could make a huge impact on these amazing pieces of land.

- From a social perspective, I think we have a responsibility if we know we can do better to do better without blaming it on humans for climate change or even getting into that debate.

We're at a point where we're smart enough to know that the science is that we're doing some harm to our environment and there are things that we can do like not using a straw for me wasn't a big deal, bringing a reusable cup I think for most people won't be a big deal once we just sort of get that into their heads that this is a way that you can help out.

- [Joe] It's one thing to hear about the zero waste efforts for a six million acre park, it's another to see it in action.

Bill DeVine manages Denali's recycling program.

With all that you see here, this has been prepackaged and sorted.

This is just about two weeks worth of recycling for the park.

- Every time I come in, I look through the bins to see if there's anything I can quickly identify that shouldn't be in there.

We're seeing the volume through this building increase.

When we had our baseline study here in 2015, we had I wanna say 38,000 pounds of recycle left this building and then in 2016, it was about 52,000 and then last year, we were right around 72,000 pounds coming out of this building.

[upbeat music] - [Joe] The numbers are encouraging across the board.

Reports show that in 2017, Denali National Park and Preserve was 40% more affected at diverting waste drained than the year prior, and that's with a 10% increase in park visitors.

That means quite simply, it's working.

[peaceful music] - We're really excited to get to the point where we see sort of the amount of trash per person start on the decline because that'll show that we've been successful in really educating that consumer ahead of time about the relatively simple things that they can do.

To really change a waste excessive culture though, the zero landfill effort can't just be contained to the park itself.

Denali Education Center is a nonprofit partner of Denali National Park and Preserve.

It has been for 30 years.

- We're the bridge from the national perk service to the community getting information about what the park is doing with zero landfill to out community 'cause Denali National Park is set up a little bit differently than other parks where a lot of the tourism business does not happen within the park boundaries.

It's where the hotels are, the restaurants.

The Holland America Princess Corporation that has a huge presence here in Denali, they're back hauling cardboard.

They have these empty trucks going to Anchorage, they load these empty trucks with cardboard, taking that cardboard to Anchorage, and last year, I believe they recycled 34,000 pounds.

This year, as of a couple weeks ago, they were already up to 44,000.

They've already surpassed what they did last year and are doing more and they're thinking of other creative ways.

They're not putting a plastic liner in their trash cans for housekeeping, they're not just automatically putting a straw in a cup.

They will only give a straw upon request.

Things like that, they're little things that can make a big difference.

Our community's very proud.

I think if you were to talk to some people who have lived here for a long time and the kids who are growing up here, they're really proud of this place and the fact that we do have all this protected land right next door and they love this place, they love Denali.

They really feel that they have a lot on their shoulders because of all this tourism industry and they wanna make their community the best that it can be.

[peaceful music] - [Joe] What about the community?

All this talk of everything happening inside Denali's borders to help grow a greener world made me wonder what life was like outside the park's gates.

Turns out, the sustainable lifestyle is not just alive and well, it's a necessary survival skill for the resourceful gardeners I met.

They're living literally in the shadow of the mountain, finding ways to grow food in one of the most extreme environments anywhere.

- I've seen snow in June, killing frost in July, 20 degrees on the 9th of August, and I've also seen three feet of snow on the 9th of September.

We just learned to roll with it and be spontaneous and deal with all of those curve balls that nature throws at us.

The midnight sun, which is one of the unique aspects of the eccentricities of Alaska, that we have midnight sun photosynthesis taking place in the wee hours of the night, which spikes the sugar content in all of the tissue.

The photosynthesis is continuously rolling so the crops will reach enormous size in a short period of time so we may only have 100 days in the growing season, but the midnight sun will make the produce reach enormous size in a short period of time.

Some of the produce gets so big, you need a wheelbarrow to carry around a 50 pound cabbage or a zucchini that's this big, but in that it grew so fast, it's still sweet and moist and crisp.

To have a baseball-sized radish that you could eat like an apple that doesn't have woody fibers coating the outer edge of it is Alaska, but it's a special place to grow.

We really enjoy it.

[peaceful music] - [Joe] Look at this.

Look how beautiful this is.

Oh my gosh.

- [Kid] You can eat that.

- [Joe] I'm so gonna eat this.

- [Woman] You can eat that now.

[woman giggles] - [Joe] Oh my God.

- It's doing pretty good.

- You've got beans growing here.

- I know.

It's a test, it's an experiment.

[woman laughs] - Everything's an experiment, and that's what you should be doing.

I love this.

Your tomatoes are doing great.

- They're doing really good.

- You're gonna have a lot of tomatoes pretty soon.

- I hope so.

- You will.

- This is the first year I put my compost inside.

I always had it outside and it just never gotten hot enough.

Do this nice and slow.

- Look how good that looks.

- I got worms this year.

- Excellent.

- Come on in guys.

- Look at how much this is.

Look at the strawberries.

- You guys want a strawberry?

- Absolutely I want a strawberry.

Thank you.

- I love strawberries.

- Time out.

That is red sugar.

Oh my gosh.

How do you do that?

It's not under stress I guess.

I maybe need to take tips from you.

[woman laughs] This looks so good.

It's amazing what you can do in a relatively small space.

- We got corn growing somehow.

[woman laughs] - This is crazy.

I have never seen corn growing in a greenhouse.

This is an improvised irrigation system that harvests rainwater from the outside and it comes into the greenhouse and it's driven by a pump, right?

Then you can water the entire garden from the water that you harvest outside in a system that her husband Allen designed himself in addition to building this greenhouse from scratch.

This is incredible how productive this place is.

There's so many things growing in here, all different varieties.

You're defying the seasons.

You've got cool season crops and warm season crops all growing at the same time and all growing successfully.

Good job Jessica.

- Thank you.

- Each one of these panels come up.

I already harvested this row of spinach.

This is the second planting of kale and then today and tomorrow, harvest all the rest of those greens, hard boil it, and throw it in the freezer and do one more.

We're already harvesting tomatoes.

- You sure are.

- [Joe] And some aren't just growing vegetables to feed themselves.

Jimmy and his wife Laura run an organic farm that supplies hyper local produce to many of the restaurants around Denali.

- 229 Restaurant at mile 229 on the park's highway who is owned and run by the guru chef Laura Cole, who we just feel so lucky to be in a collaborative effort with, has been able to take the food as it's coming out of the ground, she will build new recipes that will be featured on her menu that she prints daily for each serving.

For that day, if I deliver her a whole tote of fresh carrots, here come the roasted carrots on the menu and that'll probably be one of the things she might feature 'til the end of the season, but the buses will drive these totes of food out and even be able to highlight it to the guests on the bus.

We just picked up the produce from the farm and you'll be eating this produce that's in these totes that's riding in the back of the bus that was just harvested yesterday.

In their minds, they're starting to see that there's something happening up here in Denali National Park.

[peaceful music] - We met so many Alaskans who were making something happen, each in their own inspiring way.

BJ Yanuchi is an autistic young entrepreneur with his own thriving organic gardening business just outside the Denali preserve.

You're doing a lot of seed starts?

- Oh yeah.

- That's good.

That can be very profitable.

BJ, how did you turn your love and interest of gardening into a successful business?

- I mostly did that by loving to grow things I love growing things and I love helping my family out.

I'm proud of myself for doing well, I'm proud of being organic, and I'm very proud of supplying restaurants and having a bunch of people eat them.

My favorite part is making customers extremely happy and making customers proud of me and giving them real good organic products and real good flowers too.

- [Joe] While a local farmer's market here may have a lot less traffic than what most of us enjoy on a typical Saturday morning, BJ takes care of a loyal customer base that in turn, takes care of him.

- Thank you for your support.

As a business owner, you need lots of community support.

- One of the best things about this community is they've embraced BJ, everybody loves him, and they're very supportive.

- What's not to love?

There is a lot to love about the people here, and the place itself, and that's what the zero landfill initiative is ultimately about, people doing their part to preserve this place and the places we all call home.

[peaceful music] - I think everybody wants to do good.

I think down in their heart, everybody wants to do good, but it's really tough to do good.

It's not easy.

Easy is just throwing it in the garbage can and just saying goodbye and not really knowing where it's going.

[peaceful music] - Making a lower impact on the environment, smaller carbon footprint, it's pretty amazing.

I wanna be part of that effort, that movement.

- I think part of this is the notion of sustainability is interwoven into the park service ethos and certainly our corporate ethic.

As I like to say, we're in the forever business in the national park service.

We're here so that your grandchildren's grandchildren can have the same kind of experiences that you're having.

The recipe for success lies in each one of us, individually recognizing what our personal responsibility is and how easy it is for us to do the things that we can do to make a difference and ensure sustainability.

If we do that, and particularly if we do that in partnership with one another, working together to really sort of effectively employ those best practices, I think this is gonna be the next big social change.

[peaceful music] - Our visit here to Denali was simply incredible.

It's even hard to put into words just how awe-inspiring a place like this is when you see it in person, but after experiencing nature like this, so pure and unspoiled, it becomes even more obvious why a zero waste initiative is so important because that's the way it should be, that's the way it needs to be for all of this to continue to thrive for future generations.

While zero waste may seem overwhelming for a park the size of the entire state of New Hampshire, I'm also inspired by all the government agencies and the local residents and businesses and corporate sponsors and even teenagers like BJ who are all working together to do their part to help make that goal a reality.

It's also a reminder to me that maybe we should all work a little bit harder to make our own patches of land a bit greener too.

If you'd like to learn more about zero waste or Denali National Park and Preserve or anything else that you saw in the show today, you can do that on our website under the show notes for this episode.

The website address, that's the same as our show name.

It's growingagreenerworld.com.

Thanks for watching everybody.

I'm Joe Lamp'l and we'll see you back here next time for more Growing a Greener World.

- [Male Announcer] Growing a Greener World is made possible in part by: - [Female Announcer]: so you can roam the Earth with a lighter footprint.

- [Male Announcer] And the following: [ambient electronic music] ♪ [male announcer]: Continue the garden learning from the program you just watched, Growing a Greener World.

Program host Joe Lamp'l's online gardening academy offers classes designed to teach gardeners of all levels, from the fundamentals to master skills.

Classes are on-demand any time.

Plus, opportunities to ask Joe questions about your specific garden in real time.

Courses are available online.

For more information or to enroll, go to: [funky techno jingle] ♪ ♪