XANTERRA’S DYLAN HOFFMAN AT YELLOWSTONE SELECTED A 2021 ENVIRONMENT + ENERGY LEADER

January 07th, 2022

MAMMOTH HOT SPRINGS, MT, December 21—Dylan Hoffman, Xanterra Travel Collection®’s Sustainability Director for Yellowstone National Park, is named a 2021 Environment + Energy Leader 100 Honoree. This is an annual “best of” list from a competitive nomination process of environmental and energy professionals. Selection is based on leadership in their organization and industry resulting in significant environmental improvements.

For the past ten years, Dylan Hoffman has lead the sustainability program for Xanterra Travel Collection® in the iconic, popular, fragile, and remote Yellowstone National Park. Xanterra is a private hospitality company with a mission to provide “Legendary Hospitality with a Softer Footprint” as it operates the lodging, restaurants, and retail outlets in the park under a contract with the National Park Service. Dylan has done a remarkable job leading his small department, Xanterra colleagues and partners in reducing the environmental footprint of over four million annual visitors.

One of the most interesting, complex and pioneering projects that Dylan helped to spearhead—both through his role as Sustainability Director at Xanterra and as a member of the board of the Western Sustainability Exchange—is the Northern Great Plains Regenerative Grazing Project. This project involves paying ranchers who make a 30-year commitment to implement sustainable management practices, notably high intensity, rapid rotational grazing that improves soil health and increases carbon sequestration. Project partner Native Energy works with others to measure and verify the carbon sequestration and market the offsets. Xanterra funds part of the program and receives 7,500 mTon/yr of carbon offsets, which is equal to emissions from electricity use in all of their buildings. This contributes to Xanterra’s goal of 50% GHG emissions reduction by 2025.

For more information on Xanterra Travel Collection® at Yellowstone visit: YellowstoneNationalParkLodges.com

For photos of Yellowstone and Dylan Hoffman visit: LINK

Media Contact:

René Mack / rmack@percepture.com

Background information on various projects and initiatives

The Grazing Project/support for Montana Rancher:

Over the last several years, Yellowstone has partnered with Western Sustainability Exchange and NativeEnergy to develop the Northern Great Plains Regenerative Grazing Project. The project, first of its kind in the US, is helping to bridge the upfront investment necessary for ranchers to improve their soil health and sequester carbon by incorporating regenerative ranching practices. These practices not only allow Xanterra to offset 100% of its fossil-fuel based electricity but increase soil health, improve ranch productivity, and enhance the ecosystem as a whole.

LEED Certification

The built environment has a significant impact on resource use and Xanterra is committed to practices to support sustainable design and construction by using LEED certification as a standard, the green building industry’s most recognized benchmark. Xanterra has certified 9 different projects in Yellowstone – of which Dylan has been on the design team for 8 of. This includes all five of the beautiful guest lodges at Canyon – making it the project the largest sustainable design and construction project in the history of the National Park Service.

Sustainable cuisine, local food providers:

Yellowstone operates over 20 guest restaurants, cafes, and lounges throughout its operations, and prioritizes the sourcing of ingredients from local farms, ranches, breweries, and distilleries. Xanterra believes it is important to support the hardworking families behind these local businesses and are proud to serve food that is fresh, delicious, and sustainable that helps fuel its guests’ and employees’ Yellowstone adventures.

Some additional facts:

Dylan’s efforts have also led to many third-party certifications for sustainability improvements at Yellowstone, including:

9 LEED certified buildings including one silver, five gold, and one platinum.
• The first 4-star Certified Green Restaurant™ in the National Park System in the Mammoth Hotel Dining Room. Some of the efforts that led to this highest possible level of certification also resulted in 151,739 gallons of water, 210,373kWh electricity, 75,000lbs of waste, and $32,863 energy and water costs in this one restaurant.
• Green Seal bronze certification for the Lake Hotel (recently upgraded to Gold by one of his employees).
• An ISO 14001 certified Environmental Management System (EMS) for the entire property
• Business Emerald Sustainability Tier (BEST) level of sustainability performance from the Riverwind Foundation in 2019.

Other measures of improvement include (most metrics compare pre-pandemic operations from 2014-2019):

23% reduction in electricity consumption: From collaborative projects such as a new green housekeeping program that his staff calculated saves 150,000 kWh/yr
• 35% water use reduction: From projects such as new tunnel washers that reduced water consumption from 3 gal/lb of laundry to 0.3 gal/lb, saving over 8 million gallons of water per year
• 63% waste diversion: From projects such as Dylan’s successful push to reduce single-use plastic bottles by switching to canned water and also his persistence in maintaining a park-wide compost program which diverted over 1 million pounds of waste in 2019.
• 53% sustainable or local retail merchandize and 58% cuisine: Through partnerships and connections with local producers and vendors