Sprawling across more than 25,000 acres, Walt Disney World is a theme park resort that operates on a scale unlike any other. Although we’re generally focused on the rides and shows that make visiting the resort so much fun, occasionally we like to take a step back and look at exactly how a place like Walt Disney World can actually function on a day-to-day basis.
With around 60,000 employees and hundreds of thousands of guests on-site at any one time, Walt Disney World consumes a vast amount of resources. And they’re not all the kinds of resources that you’d first think of, such as gasoline, electricity and water. Some of them are much more ordinary and unexciting – but serve to illustrate just how big the resort really is.
Here are 10 examples of mundane items that Walt Disney World consumes like crazy…
10. Toilet tissue
We’re not sure exactly how many bathrooms there are at Walt Disney World. Certainly, there are dozens of toilet cubicles at each of its theme parks. Then there are the en-suite bathrooms of the 25,000+ rooms at its various on-site hotels. Whatever the precise count, there are a lot of them.
As a result, in 2004 Walt Disney World reportedly used some 194,871 miles of toilet tissue.
9. Bandages
All those clumsy children wandering around Walt Disney World’s theme parks are bound to trip and stumble occasionally (as are the drunken adults stumbling around Epcot’s World Showcase. No wonder, then, that the resort dishes out more than 200,000 bandages every year.
8. Pens
All those Cast Members have got to make notes occasionally. They can jot them down with some of the 3.8 million ballpoint pens that the resort buys every year.
7. Eggs
Eggs are essential ingredient of many dishes – and Walt Disney World serves up a lot of food. Around 3 million pounds of eggs are used by the resort every single year.
6. Flour
All those on-site bakeries have got to used something to make their bread and pastries. Walt Disney World uses an insane 1.8 million pounds of flour annually.
5. Ribbon
The Christmas decorations at Walt Disney World are extensive, covering dozens of hotels, the four theme parks, Downtown Disney and many other areas. 300,000 yards of ribbon are required for this task.
4. French fries
Almost everything is served with a side of fries at Walt Disney World’s quick-service restaurants. Guests munch their way through 9 million pounds of them every year.
3. Paper
Almost 150 million sheets of paper are used by Walt Disney World annually. But the resort does use recycled paper.
2. Bleach
Cleaning Walt Disney World’s theme parks, hotels and other attractions is an immense task undertaken by a vast army of staff. The resort consumes more than 700,000 gallons of bleach in a typical year.
1. Worms
The residents of Disney’s Animal Kingdom are a hungry bunch. As well as consuming over 2,000 pounds of vegetation each day, they also eat more than 40,000 worms every single week.
