06 February 2006

Greening the Gridiron: Environmental Responsibility at the Super Bowl and Beyond


The National Football League held its second annual carbon-neutral Super Bowl in Detroit Sunday. Here is my article on the NFL's efforts to tackle environmental responsibility, published today in GreenBiz.com:



Greening the Gridiron



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5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Nice post. As an Eagle fan, green is good when it's football. Glad to see the birds sign up for the "Virtual March". (As a Red Sox fan I guess your a Patriot fan too. If so, I'll let that go for now because you wrote an insightful piece.)

Your piece was informative and a great look at the NFL and their environmental stewardship. I did however find it odd that with the exception of Ford Motor Company, more advertisers didn't use the buy-green theme in their commercials. In fact most of the commercials were pathetic. Explain how a company can spend so much for the buy and produce such a sorry message. A can, when opened, is part of a rap tune?

A few more weeks and catchers and pitchers report. Good luck.

CT Green Warrior
buildingCTgreen.com

The Green Skeptic said...

I agree, the advertisers missed the boat on this one. There were more green-tinted ads during the World Series this past October.

How many of those companies advertising will be around for next years' Super Bowl? And Ford's woes continue, as we learned last week. Alas, enlightenment is hard to attain.

Thanks for your comment. (Do we really have Coco Crisp in centerfield?)

Anonymous said...

"It seems that the actions taken to supposedly achieve carbon neutrality are totally unrelated to the scale of the environmental impact of the event.

Maybe I am wrong, but in that case, I would like to see a credible study estimating the impacts of the Super Bowl, including all the emissions associated with air and other travel."

The Green Skeptic said...

You raise a valid question about air and other travel. I understand the NFL included air travel in their original inquiry. They were advised that most people travel to Super Bowl via regularly scheduled commercial aircraft, with the exception of a few flights such as team charters. Given that these flights take place regardless of Super Bowl, the team that conducted the original study discounted this as a major factor.

The Oak Ridge National Laboratories, one of the top research centers in the world when it comes to calculating GHG emissions, did the original calculations.

As I understand it, their charge was to identify the GHG impacts related specifically to Super Bowl activities. In other words, those activities that would not have existed without Super Bowl taking place.

I suspect the NFL folks would welcome another independent study of the impacts, if you wanted to approach them about it.

Thanks for your question.

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the post. I'm wondering about the source of the "260 tons" of CO2 figure. Seems extremely low IF it takes into account the transportation factor. Seems more like a figure that's restricted to stadium lights and other generators, not including transportation. Can you fill us in?