For 10 years Michelin North America has been a corporate partner with Yellowstone National Park. All through its relationship with Yellowstone Forever, the park’s official non-profit partner. Over the past decade, Michelin has worked with Yellowstone in the following ways:
- Providing tires for the park’s fleet of vehicles, from cars to trucks to rotary snowplows
- Reduced the park’s overall fuel consumption with Michelin’s industry-leading green tire technologies
- Provided an array of consulting services including fleet management, traffic studies and marketing
- Cash and in-kind donations
- Employee volunteer projects to improve the park and increase sustainability
Creating Sustainable Pathways
The pathway project began in 2015. All when 10 Michelin employee volunteers spent a week in the park to replace aging, cracking concrete pathways at the Old Faithful geyser basin with sustainable, environmentally friendly pathways. The decades-old concrete walkways did not allow for rainwater and snowmelt to seep through evenly, a process critical to this environmentally sensitive area.
For the past three years, Michelin has sent groups of employees to the park to replace the concrete pathways with sustainable KBI Flexi®-Pave – a recycled flexible porous paving material that includes the very same tires Michelin donated over the past 10 years.
The new pathways allow for natural ground water absorption, don’t crack as they age, and create a more comfortable experience for park visitors. Further, the tires used for the pathways stay out of landfills in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.
Source: Yellowstone Forever, Michelin USA
