Life Cycle Management Approach to the Design of Large-Scale Resorts

The Walt Disney Company has been dedicated to understanding and reducing its environmental impacts for years. As a large and complex corporation, quantifying and understanding the most beneficial and cost-effective ways to reduce these impacts can be a challenge. Life cycle costing (LCC) has already played an important role in the evaluation of design decisions at Walt Disney Imagineering (WDI). Recently, WDI has started to incorporate environmental life cycle assessment (LCA) alongside existing LCC efforts to move towards life cycle management (LCM). In order to be a practical tool for large-scale developments, LCM must be scalable and effective at a wide level of detail. Evaluating the large footprint of a major resort is highly complex and involves a wide variety of components and processes, at a scale shared by small to mid-size cities and communities. To deliver a sustainable design for a new Disney resort, our research is focused on determining what level of detail and scope will be sufficient to support design decisions on this scale, without expending more resources than necessary. Furthermore, the development of internal tools and processes will be necessary to integrate environmental impact information into the design process. Providing life cycle information to the broad spectrum of park designers and planners in a useful and understandable format is critical to fully pursuing life cycle management. Integrating these tools into the design process will help establish sustainability as a core consideration in the design of our resorts.