Mountain Resort Vail Is Taking Its Sustainability Efforts to New Heights
3 min
One of the largest names in the ski world is taking steps to make the industry more sustainable.
“The outdoors is our business,” says Kate Wilson, vice president of environmental and social responsibility at Vail Resorts.
Vail Resorts, a mountain resort company with a network of 41 ski resorts across four countries, set out to make a major commitment to their sustainability efforts in 2017. The intent was to achieve a net-zero operating footprint by 2030. This “Commitment to Zero” includes the ambitious goal of zero net emissions, zero waste to landfill, and zero net operating impact on forests and habitat.
“On day one, we didn’t have the road maps and plans on how we were going to get there, but we’ve since built those,” Wilson says. “And we’ve brought others in the industry with us.”
Just six years later, Vail Resorts is ahead of schedule to reach its emissions goals and on track to achieve the zero net operating footprint by 2030. The company reached 100% renewable electricity for the second year and hit its 2030 energy-efficiency target early.
Offsets are another way Vail Resorts is supporting sustainability. They have reforested over 200 acres of land since 2017 and support wind farms across the country. Plum Creek is a large-scale wind farm enabled by Vail Resorts. In its 2023 fiscal year, it produced 350,177 megawatt hours of renewable electricity, equivalent to the electricity needed to power 48,286 homes for one year.
“Sustainability and the way it is integrated into our business and operationalised with every decision that we make is something I’m really proud of,” Wilson says. “We’re not just thinking about how we, as a resort, can make an impact on climate change but how we can use our voice across our resorts, our industry, and beyond.”
Commitment to Zero gives the Vail Resorts properties one central sustainability focus. With one common goal, the company can lean into and take advantage of their enterprise network.
“At every resort we’re sharing lessons learned: ‘We did this thing in Whistler, we should do it in Park City,’” Wilson says. “That’s the power of the network and coming together to say, ‘what can we do that’s bigger than each of our resorts?’”
To further that goal of sharing lessons and ideas, Vail Resorts spearheaded The Mountain Collaborative for Climate Action in 2019. Now with over 76 resorts in the collaborative, the group works together on innovative solutions to help spread sustainability across the ski industry. Vail Resorts also partners with the National Ski Areas Association on quarterly meetings to discuss items related to green initiatives and share its experiences with an even larger group.
“There are smaller resorts that don’t have sustainability resources. We can share lessons learned, come up with solutions where we tell them, for example, how we recycle our nitrile gloves and turn them into pellets that become playgrounds,” explains Wilson. “We don’t need to own these things we want to share with others so they can take action, too.”
Developing innovative solutions for recycling and reducing landfill waste is a key part of this sustainability strategy. Initiatives to collect and upcycle waste can be easily replicated at multiple resorts. A project to collect and recycle soft plastics into decking is being piloted at various properties across the Vail Resorts mountains.
Other innovative solutions Vail Resorts has implemented include the ski industry’s only gondola-based waste removal system, a custom-designed recycling center at Vail Mountain, and a resource-efficient snowmaking system.
Vail Resorts also leans on strategic partners to assist with their green efforts. The company worked with PepsiCo, their on-mountain beverage partner, to develop a program to upcycle candy and snack wrappers into furniture and terrain park features. There’s now a Mountain Dew wallride in the terrain park at Breckenridge crafted from recycled bottles and snack packaging materials.
The company also joined together with Helly Hansen to turn old ski resort work uniforms into tote bags and ski patrol backpacks. The products were sold on behalf of their EpicPromise Employee Foundation, which provides hardship and education grants to teammates.
The employee foundation is one way Vail Resorts is expanding its efforts beyond environmental initiatives. The company has a large youth access program and hosted more than 11,000 youths across 32 properties in the 2022-23 season, according to the resort.
“We really believe the future of the sport is inclusion. We care deeply about removing some of those barriers to have people try the sport for the first time,” Wilson says.
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From making unpopular decisions to learning when to listen, leaders from five businesses reveal what nobody prepared them for — and how running a company has challenged their expectations.
Technology and semiconductor shares fell sharply as investors questioned the debt financing the AI infrastructure boom and confronted higher rates and Chinese competition.
Elon Musk is exploring a potential merger between Tesla and SpaceX, a deal that could reshape the future of AI, robotics, autonomous vehicles and space technology. With a combined valuation potentially reaching $3.5 trillion, the move could bring Musk’s vision of an interconnected technology ecosystem closer to reality, although a deal remains uncertain.
5 min
Elon Musk has engineered ties between Tesla TSLA 3.41%increase; up pointing triangle and SpaceX SPCX 7.79%increase; up pointing triangle that are hard to break, and now he wants to fuse them together permanently.
Musk has run both Tesla and SpaceX concurrently over the past two decades, using a schedule that dictated which days he spent focused on each business.
The companies have often shared resources and personnel, signaling their close ties. Last year, SpaceX looked into creating a spacesuit for Tesla’s humanoid robot Optimus, a person familiar with the matter said. Tesla last week showed off its new Roadster, a vehicle featuring SpaceX rocket thrusters that it hopes to soon bring to market.
And in recent months, Musk has repositioned both companies by expanding beyond their core operations toward a shared mission centered on artificial intelligence.
The world’s richest man on Tuesday signaled his interest in tying up SpaceX and Tesla, marking what would be the biggest corporate merger of all time. Because he serves as chief executive of SpaceX and Tesla, Musk said committees of independent directors at both companies are evaluating a possible deal, adding that a transaction might not come to fruition.
The committees will likely evaluate, with lawyers and bankers, how each company would fare in a potential deal and how a deal might best be structured. They then present their conclusions to their respective boards, who typically vote on whether to proceed.
“It’s an odd Kabuki dance where two groups of people are talking and I can’t be in the conversation,” Musk told SpaceX investors on Tuesday in response to an analyst’s question about a potential deal.
For Musk, the merger supports his vision of a world full of autonomous cars, humanoid robots and weekly rocket launches, as well as the data centers and satellites required to keep the whole thing running.
Some investors and analysts said they expect a transaction would be structured as an all-stock deal, with SpaceX potentially paying a modest premium for Tesla shares.
SpaceX, which has a market value of about $2 trillion, said it is seeing sharp growth in revenue across its businesses, which include operating data centers, launching rockets and operating satellite networks such as the internet service Starlink. Tesla is valued at about $1.5 trillion and is expanding its operations beyond its automotive and energy business. Shares in both companies traded higher following the news Tuesday.
Musk’s substantial ownership stakes in both companies, along with voting control at SpaceX, has enabled him to set the deal in motion. Analysts and investors said the deal will probably face regulatory scrutiny internationally, though some see Musk’s close relationship with the Trump administration as an asset to getting approval.
Blurred lines
The companies haven’t said which directors are on the special committees evaluating a potential deal. Several SpaceX and Tesla board members have either personal or business ties to Musk. And like Musk, venture capitalist Ira Ehrenpreis sits on both boards.
In a filing this week, Tesla outlined millions of dollars in business agreements with SpaceX and its subsidiaries last year, including $143 million in car sales to SpaceX, $3.3 million in advertising that it bought on the social-media platform X and $430 million in revenue from the sale of Megapack batteries for SpaceX’s data centers.
The companies also split the cost of resources including the use of Musk’s SpaceX jet and the bill for his personal security, which he runs through a private company.
Employees at both companies routinely move between companies to work on special projects, and some executives have dual roles, including Charles Kuehmann, vice president of materials engineering at both SpaceX and Tesla, and Ashok Elluswamy, the vice president of AI software at Tesla who runs a joint venture with SpaceX called Digital Optimus.
Over the years, Musk has launched new startups within his empire, including brain-implant company Neuralink, underground-tunnel developer the Boring Company and xAI, the AI startup that merged with SpaceX in February.
It is that AI business that Musk thinks can serve a market worth tens of trillions of dollars, justifying the need for a merger.
The business case goes like this: Tesla is developing robotaxis and robots, which it calls “physical AI.” SpaceX is working on the back end of physical AI: the data-center capacity and internet connection required for those robotaxis and robots to operate continuously.
“I don’t see what the value of Tesla is if it’s not merged with SpaceX,” said investment adviser Ross Gerber, a former Tesla bull turned critic invested in both companies. “If they don’t merge, the brains of everything that runs Tesla is owned by another company.”
On top of it all, both companies face constraints on the supply chains they need to make this world a reality, particularly when it comes to chips. To address this, Musk earlier this year announced a joint venture between Tesla, SpaceX and Intel to design and manufacture chips in Texas. “The most epic chip-building exercise by far,” he has said.
Musk at the wheel
For Musk, a merger would also solve two problems: demands on his attention and his lack of control at Tesla.
Tesla for years was Musk’s only public company, a status that came with greater scrutiny. There, Musk reports to a public board, as well as individual investors who make up around 30% of Tesla’s voting power, according to FactSet.
The question of Musk’s attention became a particular focus for investors and the board in recent years after he acquired Twitter in 2022 and launched xAI in 2023, and again in 2025 as he spent time in Washington, D.C., running the Department of Government Efficiency in the early months of President Trump’s second term.
As Tesla’s car business suffered in 2025, Musk threatened to take his AI ambitions outside the company if he wasn’t granted 25% voting control. Last November, Tesla shareholders approved a new pay package for Musk, which created a path for him to vastly expand his stake.
As of Sept. 30, Musk owned a roughly 20% stake in Tesla, according to the company’s proxy filing.
The SpaceX IPO gave Musk a different path. When SpaceX went public in June, the deal’s structure enabled him to have more than 80% voting power at the company—so much that he can’t be fired and decisions can’t be made without his support.
If SpaceX acquires Tesla, he will likely stay in control.
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