Renewable Energy

What I Found Behind Disney World’s Hidden Systems

by Matt FerrellSunny Natividad

Jul 21, 2026

17 min read

Author Matt Ferrell

Coauthor

Video Editor Sunny Natividad

Consultant

I got an exclusive backstage look at Disney World expecting a polished sustainability tour.

Then I watched old beer bottles ground into sand for their greenhouses.

Then I stood in an overgrown solar field to support native bees and insects, watched tourist food scraps turn to compost, and later read about an ambitious food-waste to-energy loop that had gone kaput.

That last part is what made this interesting. Disney World is basically a small city with rides, and the mouse is the mayor in these parts. So I had three questions. How much of its sustainability story is real? How much only works because Disney had decades to build its own infrastructure? And what happens when one of those loops breaks?

A quick disclosure upfront. Disney flew me down and covered the hotel, but they aren’t sponsoring this video. My opinions are my own, and they’re seeing it for the first time with you.

Most corporate sustainability videos flop because the pitch reads like a brochure. Often, they’re greenwashed with vague terms, like "ecofriendly" with no measurable goals or tested science. But when Disney reached out to talk to me about what they’re doing, they skipped the slogans. They offered to take me backstage, to see the actual machines and the people who run them, and let me chase whatever thread I wanted. There was nothing goofy about it.

The openness got me interested.

In all fairness, the corporate sustainability bar Disney has to clear is low. The richest companies on earth are missing or walking back their climate goals. Microsoft's emissions are up about 23% since 2020, and it blames AI data centers.¹ Google's are up roughly 48% since 2019.² Amazon quietly killed its "Shipment Zero" pledge.³ It turns out relying on the voluntary pledges of profit-seeking mega corps to solve climate change isn't an ideal strategy.

That's the backdrop, but to get the full picture we need to understand the massive scale of Disney World in Florida. At about 30,000 acres, it's roughly twice the size of Manhattan, although it's unclear which place gives more power to rodents. This huge amusement zone takes in around 50 million visitors a year. It has four parks, two water parks, about 29,000 hotel rooms, hundreds of restaurants, and roughly 5,000 animals.⁴ Disney World is basically a sizeable American city with rides.

The city-sized scale is a serious opportunity when it comes to making sustainability systems with impact.

But how far can a company take these systems?

Sustainability as UX

My take on this actually comes from my old job. I used to run a user experience, or UX team. Good user experience belongs to every team. It's every single touchpoint a customer has with you or your company. In my former corporate life, that meant the app, the website, the marketing messages, and customer service when someone needed help.

Disney World's approach to sustainability reminded me of that. It's everywhere. They have an actual environmental sciences team, because they run accredited zoos and aquariums. And this environmentally conscious approach goes way beyond energy. That expertise shows up in places you wouldn't expect like solar fields, cruise ships, or the resort's designs and operations … but also in some you would expect, like compost.

That was the story they pitched me, anyway. The backstage tour was where it would hold up or fall apart.

Energy and the pollinator twist

The first stop was a solar array near Epcot, shaped like a hidden Mickey … it’s actually the largest hidden Mickey in the park. And if you want a detailed tour of all the hidden Mickeys...you're going to need to find a different kind of YouTube channel. The array is about 5 megawatts, with 48,000 panels across 22 acres. It's been online since 2016 on a Duke Energy power purchase agreement.⁵

This Mickey array is the small one. Across four sites, Disney now has about 212 megawatts of solar and more than 600,000 panels.⁶ The newest, Bronson Solar, is 74.5 megawatts on 484 acres in Levy County, roughly 130 miles northwest of the resort. It was built specifically for this power purchase agreement deal and energized in April 2026.⁷ Disney says the solar offsets around 140,000 metric tons of CO2 a year. That's about 33,000 cars.⁶

Now the honest caveat, because this is where most coverage gets sloppy. Disney says solar can cover "100% of the resort's daytime power." That's a peak-day claim, not an annual one.⁸ Here's what that means. On a sunny afternoon the panels can match what the parks are pulling. Average it across a full year, with mornings, nights, and cloudy days, and solar covers a much smaller slice. Disney PR told me their own utility, the Central Florida Tourism Oversight District, puts the real figure around 35% from the four arrays. At night the resort still leans on the grid and a natural gas cogeneration plant that's been running since 1988.⁹ There's no on-site battery tied to these arrays yet.

Dr. Mark Penning, who ran Disney's animals and environment team, put it this way.

"We produce enough solar to run the place while the sun is shining. Then we use financial instruments to put energy back on the grid so that we’re still getting solar energy at night time through what we put onto the grid. It’s not the same energy exactly, but you know. I think that’s a great story isn’t it." — Dr. Mark Penning, VP, Disney Animals, Science & Environment

Here's the part the skeptics miss. The usual knock is that those solar electrons don't physically flow to the parks.

True, but nobody, anywhere, gets "their own" electrons, once they’re tied to the grid. What matters is whether your money builds new clean supply that wouldn't exist otherwise, and Bronson Solar is a brand-new farm built for exactly that purpose.¹⁰ The real gold standard here would be matching clean power hour by hour, but almost nobody is there yet … Disney included.¹¹

Then came the twist that sold me on the UX idea. They’re thinking about the guest experience as they drive by the solar fields and wanting them to leave a good impression. They’re also generating energy for the parks … and they’re also making sure the functionality of the solar fields can double as pollinator habitat. I absolutely love the holistic view and multi-use strategy of technologies like this. I’ve talked about agrivoltaics on the channel before, but this dual use was new to me. I met Dr. Zak Gezon out in the array, and good habitat, it turns out, looks messy on purpose.

“These pollinator habitats are going to look different than pollinator habitats that most people think of in their homes. And you know Florida has probably about 300 species of native bees and a couple hundred species of butterflies. Native bees tend to be more limited by their nesting resources than pollen resources. And so a really good pollinator habitat that supports native bee populations needs to have not only flowers that are in flower but pithy stems, you know, unpaved ground and areas for the bees to nest. And most bees are solitary. They don’t have big hives like honey bees do. And so our pollinator habitats that are in areas like this, you know, we don’t mow them because we want to keep those nesting materials. And so you oftentimes see it and think this doesn’t look like a pollinator habitat but that’s because there’s a lot more to a good functional pollinator habitat than just flowering plants.” — Dr. Zak Gezon, Conservation & Agricultural Science Director

They concentrate the wildflowers on the edges of the arrays, the "pizza crust," because it's cheaper to water there. Also, the diversity of what they plant is the point.

"And so we have a phrase that we use, which is diversity begets diversity. And you remember a moment ago we were walking across that turf. You couldn’t hear anything at all except for traffic. Listen right now. Do you hear all of the life that is in this?

“I can hear a lot of buzzing.” — Matt Ferrell

“You can hear a lot of buzzing and chirping. This area is alive over here. " — Dr. Zak Gezon, Conservation & Agricultural Science Director

Here's what I think sets Disney apart from companies just ticking a sustainability box. Follow through. The environmental scientists ran a study to find out how pollinator setups like this compare to wild areas of land versus a bare field. So three distinct setups to see what the insect diversity and insect counts were like.

“So how does it compare? What’s it like?” — Matt Ferrell

“You know, it’s really interesting. So if you go out to just a turf area, you find a really high abundance of very few species. The really weedy species do well. In the wild area, you find relatively lower abundance, actually, but a lot of diversity. And you find the more rare species. And in the solar habitats, where we’ve added habitat like this, you find somewhere in the middle. We find much more diversity than you do in just a turf area. But you don’t pick up those really rare species like you do in the wild areas. And so it’s closer in its community composition to the wild areas than it is to just turf. But it’s not 100% replacement for just protecting wild areas. And so it’s really important to put in habitat that fits the environment.” — Dr. Zak Gezon, Conservation & Agricultural Science Director

I was impressed by that research and candor. Disney studied the trade-offs, built a team around the work, and volunteered the asterisk without being asked.

Food, waste, and the loop that failed

The most impressive closed loop sustainability system showed up at the Animal Nutrition Center. They serve about 10,000 pounds of food a day across roughly 1,200 individual animal diets. The facility has been Platinum Zero Waste certified since 2016, and runs a 96 to 98% recycling diversion rate. ⁴

Some of that food is specially tailored formulas created by Disney. One of the questions I asked them:

“What happens to the bags once they’re used?” — Matt Ferrell

“So, a couple different things. And this is where, you know, the environment changes as far as recyclability. So, we did have a vendor that was melting these down into waste to thermal energy.” — Debbie, Assistant Animal Operations Manager

“The end result becomes a fuel pellet, but in producing that fuel pellet, like a fuel pellet for wood stoves, in producing that fuel pellet, it produces energy.” — Debbie, Assistant Animal Operations Manager

They also have connections with reusing food from the resort's restaurants.

“We do also have a nice program with the land pavilion at Epcot. Have you heard of that?” — Debbie, Assistant Animal Operations Manager

“Yeah.” — Matt Ferrell

“So the hydroponics that are grown here, hydroponic vegetables and fruits, those go to the restaurants. But if the restaurants have all the fill that they can use of, let’s say cucumbers or tomatoes or peppers.” — Debbie, Assistant Animal Operations Manager

“They come here?” — Matt Ferrell

“Then we get the extras.” — Debbie, Assistant Animal Operations Manager

“Oh, that’s great.” — Matt Ferrell

And here's the UX idea again, this time pointed at garbage … or more accurately at recycling. Their mantra is "make it easy to be right." Every person should know where and how to sort the waste and recycling.

“So how we communicate to our team on how to be right when you’re recycling. So recycling, putting something into a bin and hoping it gets recycled, that doesn’t work. When we do our measurements, we’re not only measuring what’s our diversion rate, we are measuring what’s our contamination rate. So our diversion rate is actually ranging between 96 and 98%. Our contamination rate, I’m happy to report, is 0.02%.”

To do that they’ve got a communications board that tells everyone what kind of waste goes where. If something is done wrong, it’s brought up to the team right away to correct it going forward. That’s how they’ve gotten their recycling so close to 100%.

Now let's talk about the closed loop sustainability project they're proudest of: their browse program. Ok, what's browse? Browse fields grow the kinds of crops the animals like to eat. Disney grows leafy "browse" on an on-site farm. The animals eat it, the scraps and waste get composted, and the compost goes back into the landscaping guests walk past in the parks, and into the browse fields to grow more crops.¹² It’s the circle of life in action, but maybe not in the same way as the Festival of The Lion King stage show at Disney's Animal Kingdom. The farm runs about 95 acres in total, with around 40 currently planted, and Disney says it's actively working to expand that. In 2025 that composting loop handled about 2.1 million pounds of organic material, roughly 950 metric tons.

Disney has been experimenting with waste and energy for some time. Digging through public records, I found that Disney's food waste used to help power the parks. Back in 2013, a Massachusetts company called Harvest Power built an anaerobic digester on Disney's property, the Central Florida Energy Garden.¹³ It turned the resort's food scraps into electricity, about 5 megawatts of it, and sold the power back to Disney's district.¹⁴ It's gone now … Harvest Power went out of business.¹⁵ Those food scraps got folded back into composting instead.

Honestly, this is what iteration looks like at scale. It shows that the folks at Disney are trying things, and when something doesn't work, they use the engineering process to try something else.

When you try a lot of things out, some won't work, but then again, some will. And here's a weird one that did.

In 2022, they installed a glass pulverizer at Fort Wilderness. This one machine with 28 little hammers can turn bottles into a sand alternative at a rate of about a ton an hour. That could be roughly 2,000 tons a year depending on how much it gets used.¹⁶ That sand replaces coquina shell, a finite local resource, on horse trails and in orange infield dirt at the ESPN Wide World of Sports Complex.

The best use for the sand making machine wasn't even planned. The horticulture team heard about the machine and asked to try the sand on their greenhouse floors. The whole program spread by word of mouth. The advice the team got when they started?

"The best advice I got from someone was they said to put it in a pile. People will find a use for it." — Jarrod, Environmental Project Manager

“One of the first calls I got was from our horticulture team. And they said, you know what, we're using coquina in the greenhouse floors. We need something that's permeable, especially the hanging basket house. The baskets are getting watered. The water is dropping down, needs to be able to go down. And I said, well, let's try it. And so they started using it on that greenhouse floor. And they're still doing it. It's worked great for them. They've really liked it.” — Jarrod, Environmental Project Manager

Disney won an award for this pilot in 2023.¹⁷ But the experimentation with this is continuing with other teams around the park, like the construction teams. They're looking into building with the pulverized glass or using it in things like concrete pads.

The line that stuck with me was this one:

"For me Innovation doesn't have to be high-tech. It only needs to be effective." — Jarrod

If you’d like to see more of the glass pulverizer in action and how it works, I’ll have an extended cut on that over on my Patreon.

“So we'll kind of give you the walk around of how it works. It is a simple machine. We've got a feed hopper on the front, and so Miguel over there, he's going to dump that hopper full of glass in there, and just a conveyor system that rides up to the top. Up in the very top of this hood, there is a misting nozzle. So we do have dust suppression on it. So it's going to put a little bit of mist over it. You'll see some dust when it first fires up because it's dry inside, but then it'll settle down. You'll actually see more dust from the vehicles driving behind us than the machine will put off once it gets going. The glass falls down into the hammer mill. And this is where the magic really happens. And this is a hammer that we actually took out of it. This one is, you can see it's damaged a little bit because someone fed it something that's not glass. But it fits onto a shaft that goes down the middle, bolts into it, and then these are the hammers that hit the glass. And so it's a percussive action and it shatters the glass and helps it separate from the labels and the lids and all of that. So it's really interesting when you see what comes out of it. And you'll see a little bit of glass sometimes stuck to the back of labels. the most interesting and we'll see if maybe one goes through it but there's a certain bottle that has a wax cover on the top of it and when that bottle goes through the wax is still whole and in one piece but the glass is gone and that kind of gives you an idea of what's happening inside the machine it is it is fun to see so inside the back of the machine itself so the glass moves down the hammer mill up here there's 28 of those hammers in here and it falls down through this chute and into this trommel. So the fine stuff, we call it fine-cullet and coarse-cullet. So that sand size material comes out of this screen first into here. The large material falls from this screen and then anything that's bigger than that and those corks, those lids, labels, all of that falls out of the end. So you'll see a little bit of paper coming through in the bigger stuff and in a bigger machine we would actually have cleaning equipment to make sure all of that you know comes out to keep it super clean but would larger machines have more filtering or is it usually just two? It's usually two or you can you can do it as one if you wanted to you could do it as one and then put it into additional screening equipment so you could and they make larger versions of just this that you could do it as many sizes as you want going down over different bunkers or something. And that's kind of, and that's some of what we're working to determine is if we scaled up, what are we using it for? What sizes do we need? So are we better off just letting one size just drop out and then sending it through a different sorting system? Or can we use it as is out of the machine? So right now, most everything that we're doing is as is sizes out of the machine. And this one produces about three times as much of the sand size as it does the gravel size. And we find ourselves using the sand size a lot more.” — Jarrod

“Would you like to do the honors?” — Jarrod

“Yeah.” — Matt Ferrell

“Just push these top three buttons. One at a time. So you hear the trommel kick on very slowly. Turn on that hammer mill. That's going to start the conveyor. So what we'll do is we'll back up. All right. And we'll let Miguel come over and drop the glass in.” — Jarrod

“So you can hear the glass now starting to go up in there. You can see it starting to come out. It does one thing and it does that one thing very efficiently.” — Jarrod

“So it's soft, it's not going to cut me, it's not going to... So as it goes around inside the hammer mill, it's grinding against the other glass and grinding against the bracing pad.” — Jarrod

“Right.” — Matt Ferrell

“And that keeps everything filed down.” — Jarrod

“It's sanding itself down essentially.” — Matt Ferrell

Water and the structure behind it all

We've covered energy and food. The third sustainability loop is water, and it's nearly invisible. Disney's wastewater plant treats around 15 million gallons a day and sends most of it back out for irrigation and on their tree farm.¹⁸ Some restrooms around the parks even use reclaimed water for flushing. It's effectively zero-discharge. If you’ve ever heard of reusing gray water for your home, Disney is doing the same kind of thing on a much larger scale.

If it seems like Disney World's sustainability programs operate more like city policy than a corporate initiative, it's because well...they do. From 1968 until 2023, Disney controlled the special district that contains Walt Disney World outright. The Mouse was effectively the mayor, and the area had its own water plant, its own fire service, and even its own zoning authority.⁹ The idea of "Disney World was its own government" was literally true ... right up until 2023, when the state took the keys and renamed it the Central Florida Tourism Oversight District.

Which brings the skeptic in me back. How much of this can be replicated by other companies, and how much only works because Disney had municipal powers long enough to build like a city?

They ran that district for 55 years. The infrastructure got poured during that runway, and the 2023 state takeover leaves that infrastructure in place. The honest tension is the runway. Disney had 55 years to build like a city, and almost nobody else gets that kind of head start. Hold that thought. I want to stay with that tension.

The honest reckoning

Before I give you my verdict, the objection I know a lot of you are sitting with … this whole trip looks like a media play. Free flights, a curated itinerary, and on-message experts. I walked in open, but you didn't, so your suspicion gets its full weight here.

So are Disney World's sustainability efforts legit? Here's my answer. The most convincing moments of my visit were the messy ones. An executive said, on the record, that Florida is "probably not the best place to do solar" because of the afternoon storms. While I don’t agree with that sentiment … I get it. Disney also admitted batteries still don't pencil out for their energy storage needs, but that could change in the future. For me, a curated tour that shows the cracks and talks openly earns more trust than a perfect brochure.

So let me put every limit on the table, because they matter. The "100% daytime" solar number covers peak daytime use, not the annual share. The site has no on-site battery storage yet. The Energy Garden digester is dead. The paper straws that are used throughout the park might get banned in Florida in 2027 over PFAS concerns. So even a solved problem could reopen.¹⁹

Also, the goals have moved. As of 2024, Disney was only about 38% of the way to its 46.2% emissions-cut target.²⁰ ²¹ So, they’re a little behind pace, like almost everyone else.

The biggest caveat is the one the loops can't fix because Disney doesn’t have any control over it. The huge number is the roughly 50 million people flying and driving to Orlando every year. That dwarfs the composting yard, and Disney's 2030 goals mostly cover direct operations, not the travel impacts.

Here's the difference. Those other companies missing their targets? Many of them hide the gaps.²² Disney put several of the gaps right in front of me. What I saw was a company that retires loops when things don't work out, and continually goes after problem areas in their operations. That looks like a team treating sustainability as everyone's job, the same way good UX is everyone's job.

That’s why I keep coming back to the glass sand. A pile of useful material, sitting there until the right team noticed it. That’s the part other companies can steal: cross-team expertise, "make it easy to be right," and enough room for good ideas to spread by word of mouth. None of that requires owning a special district, or high tech plans, it just requires communication.

Penning and the verdict

Dr. Mark Penning tied the whole thing together for me. He was retiring a few weeks after my visit. So, he could speak freely, without mousing around.

“I think we often find things we didn’t think would work worked and things that we thought, I’m not sure about that one. Turns out we were right. It wasn’t great at the time. But then things change. And then you apply it again at a later stage and suddenly, oh my gosh, this works. You know, this is good now. Also, I think all of us, and I say collectively, industry, is getting better at understanding where are the gaps, where are the things where we have solutions.” — Dr. Mark Penning, VP, Disney Animals, Science & Environment

Bottom line: try something, learn from the results, adapt and try again. So here's my take. Closed loops at this scale are real. And they need to be if they're going to matter.

But they're not perfect. They're slow, they're structural, and some of them fail. Disney's edge is time. The mouse is patient, and powerful enough to call his shots. Disney World's sustainability systems were built to think like infrastructure, with time horizons long enough that any attempt that doesn't work out becomes part of the learning curve. In an era where our megacorporations are walking back their sustainability pledges, that's pretty good.