4,400+ Pounds of Ski Equipment Diverted from the Landfill: Vail Resorts & Reclaim Plastics

For B.C.’s local mountain shops and resorts, that rule contributes to an abundance of retired ski equipment every season. Multiply that across a full assortment of rentals, unsold or outdated equipment, and other display materials, and you’re left with bins of skis, boots, poles, and helmets that can no longer be sold or rented, but still have to go “somewhere”. Historically, that “somewhere” has meant the landfill.

As part of its Commitment to Zero, Vail Resorts has made a company-wide pledge to reach zero waste to landfill across all its operations. In support of this commitment, Vail Resorts partnered with Reclaim Plastics to help ensure end-of-life ski equipment can be handled responsibly. Together, they have diverted more than 4,400 pounds of ski and snowboard equipment from local landfills, including helmets, boots, skis, poles, and display materials that had reached the end of their useful life.

Unsellable, retired and damaged equipment is more than just an environmental problem; it’s also an operational issue for many ski shops and resorts. Every helmet, ski, or boot sitting in a back room or in a storage container is either taking up valuable space, tying up staff resources, or presenting added costs for storage, management and disposal. 

For shops and resorts trying to keep up with inventory demands each season, this unusable inventory becomes expensive as it takes up storefront or warehouse space that could otherwise go towards sellable or rentable equipment for skiers and snowboarders. 

Reclaim Plastics’ certified green product destruction program eliminates both the environmental and operational issues that many ski shops and resorts face with convenient pick-up and delivery options, cost savings in freeing up warehouse and retail space, and ensuring that materials are recycled into new products and applications whenever possible – helping to divert ski waste streams from the landfill.

Product destruction is the secure process of permanently disposing of products, materials, branded and promotional items (such as inventory, recalled goods, or outdated equipment), or items that businesses need to be permanently taken out of circulation, so they can never be improperly resold, reused or redistributed. A crashed helmet or broken boot buckles fall into this same category: once this equipment is deemed unusable, unsellable and unrentable, they need to be retired for good.

Reclaim’s certified green product destruction process helps to ensure that this retired ski equipment is securely and sustainably decommissioned and diverted from the landfill. As ski equipment is conventionally challenging to recycle, because it contains many mixed and bonded materials, our in-house materials recovery lab analyzes the equipment by component. Helmets are separated by their hard outer shells from the soft-padding foam liners, while skis, boots, and poles are assessed by material, so metals, plastics, and fiberglass can each be separated and decontaminated for each individual recycling stream, wherever possible. Where some materials cannot be fully separated and decontaminated, they can be engineered for the production of new building materials such as cement, helping ensure these waste streams continue to provide value rather than being landfilled.

As the process is certified and achieves positive environmental impact, Vail Resorts also receives a Certificate of Destruction for participating in Reclaim’s program, as well as full documentation regarding the exact weight and quantities of equipment diverted from the landfill. 

Reclaim Plastics is proud to partner with environmentally forward-thinking organizations like Vail Resorts; ensuring that decommissioned equipment is permanently removed from circulation, while enabling guest safety, protection of brand integrity and giving end-of-life materials a better path than the landfill.