Play It Green

Here’s something to cheer about on Superbowl Sunday, other than the touching ascendancy of the New Orleans’ Saints. That is, if you can keep these facts straight. Here goes. NFL Films Studio, which produces a lot of football content and programming in lovely Mount Laurel, NJ, including superbowl content, will now be operating with a lot less carbon emissions. That’s thanks to Veolia Energy North America, which is taking over the “central facility” of the three-story, 200,000-square-foot studio complex, and providing its heating and cooling needs via energy-efficient chillers, a cooling tower and conventional boilers.

Also, off-green-topic, from a related press release… Did you know that NFL Films programming is aired in more than 200 countries? Who knew American football had that level of worldwide popularity and reach? But with compelling copy like this, how could it not? From the NFL Films website: “A super slow-motion sequence of a quarterback launching a spiral through a gray November sky. A receiver in full stride leaps to make a mid-air catch. A defender pulls him to the ground and brings the scene to an abrupt end. The plays happen instantly. The moments last a lifetime.” Pure poetry.

Also, fun facts! Games filmed 1965 season: 102. Games filmed 2005 season: 267.

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He’s got a heart of green. Atlanta Falcons fullback Ovie Mughelli has a foundation with the  motto “Our future is green.” Despite pictures of the larger-than-life NFLer on his (frankly, very well-executed) site clubbing with tight-dressed ladies and holding some sort of liquor named “bling,” the guy manages to come across as a down-to-earth do-gooder. He has a football camp in his home state of South Carolina where he’s big on promoting self-esteem and environmental awareness; said camp is being “greened” via recycling bins and reusable totes (it’s a start!) and he buys 40 seats per game to award to worthy kids. Also, he posed with Captain Planet (having received the “Superhero for the Earth” award). And that’s nothing if not ballsy. Also, read his blog, despite the fact that he hasn’t updated it in a year. Choice quote: “I was kinda upset because it didn’t stop raining all night, and I didn’t bring an umbrella.”

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Even when I was in high school, I didn’t invest much time or effort into the high school football games. And that includes one sad season of cheering at said games (I was the unsmiling cheerleader, which was not all that rebellious in hindsight). It didn’t help that I attended a Catholic school, whose team got their butts kicked by opposing public school teams. And then, in the past couple years, I discovered Friday Night Lights (I’ve read the book, and seen the movie, but I’m talking about the TV series). Suddenly the idea of a town so invested in this weekly football contest seemed almost enviable (what a simple thing to care about after all). It was all so unifying and important, and the people involved were not nearly as dumbed-down as I would have expected high school football fanatics to be.  I realize it’s written by scriptwriters and played by (optimistically attractive) actors, but it captures something true nonetheless. There’s something pure about high school football. It’s easy to care about, even if you don’t.

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Do you know what you’re wiping your butt with when you use the bathroom at Lincoln Financial Field–home of the Philadelphia Eagles? I do. It’s SCA Tissue! Last May, 3 former Eagles even helped the tissue company plant 15 trees—linebacker Gary Cobb, wide receiver Fred Barnett and wide receiver Mike Quick—in their 6.5-acre Eagles Forest in Neshaminy State Park in Pennsylvania. The football team’s forest was just established last year, all part of its larger Go Green initiative. Last year, they offset all their emissions by purchasing wind power. Anyway, SCA is into forest management, plants 3 trees for every one used in Europe and sells 100% recycled paper products. Now the Eagles’ stadium carries nothing but SCA’s Tork brand, meaning its more than 1 million visitors wipe their butts and mouths with tree-happy recycled content. Since 2004, the team has reduced its energy consumption by 30%, according to the Philadelphia Business Journal.

On a side note, “the Nest” would be a much cooler and greener name for the Eagles’ stadium in an alternate universe where corporate sponsorship was not necessary. Even cooler if it actually looked like the Bird’s Nest from the Beijing Olympics (which Citi Group is now converting to an entertainment and shopping center).

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By Andrew Gardner
In all of sport, the greater environment is an unnamed opponent. Bowling to auto racing. Equestrian events to slow-pitch softball. Surfing to rugby. Sport is marked by a variance of control over a world that is carefully bordered out by pavement, ski runs, white lines and targets. From the earliest cave dwelling archers to David Beckham, those with supernatural abilities set the benchmarks of sport. Fans love when teams dominate, love it more when individuals stand out. We’re thrilled when actions are superhuman, never-before-seen, record breaking and epic. Similarly we like big personalities to go with big success, even if the bigger-than-life persona is manufactured. (Witness Michael Phelps on Saturday Night Live – the great swimmer is a goofy guy, regardless of his athletic abilities.) We demand agency over existence. This affects the athletes in how they live.

The average NFL player’s career lasts three years, upping the odds for personal bankruptcy and unemployment beyond the final season. Sustainability is an ethic that could inform professional athletes beyond the interaction between the player and the green.

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‘Veggie Love’: PETA’s Banned Super Bowl Ad

PETA has topped itself again, with an attempt to sex up vegetarian eating with an ad that depicts crawling lingerie-clad models licking pumpkins and fondling broccolli. They figured that was bound to catch the attention of some hot wings-devouring football fans during the hallowed event known as Superbowl Sunday, but, alas, NBC said the spot “depicts a level of sexuality exceeding our standards” and won’t let it run. In order for the network to reconsider the ad, write the PETA folks on their blog, they’d have to cut scenes including:

* rubbing pelvic region with pumpkin

* screwing herself with broccoli (fuzzy)

* licking eggplant

* rubbing asparagus on breast

Of course, PETA, master of controversy, must be salivating itself over the sure-fire publicity its ad is now generating online. Marketing: they’re doing it right.

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Waste is such an un-sexy topic. It’s the dirty secret behind everything we do. Just as we like our meat to come pre-packaged in nondescript forms (as opposed to say, slaughtered in front of us), we like our waste tied in plastic and whisked away to Never Never Land so we can produce more and bag that up, over and over, never worrying much about where it all goes. As someone who suffered from a serious bottled water addiction (and a car that would fill with an embarrassing amount of the left-behind bottles), I know how hard a habit waste is to break. And who could be less inclined to break wasteful habits than a bunch of drunken college students?

And yet, while their football team did not bring them great joy this season, ending the season 5-7, the University of Colorado Buffaloes can still brag about their waste removal. As part of a “zero waste” push, the team’s Folsom Field managed to compost or recycle a staggering 80 percent of their waste during the last four home games. Student volunteers not only stood throughout telling fans what to throw out where, but they stayed up until 2 a.m. at times sorting through the waste according to this Times post. Apparently, while Folsom Field is the largest college football stadium to try the zero waste approach, it took cues from earlier programs at the University of California Davis and Penn State.

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The NFL is gearing up for Superbowl madness by planting trees. On Dec. 11, volunteers and schoolkids in Tampa, Florida will plant more than one thousand trees to continue the league’s Super Bowl greening efforts, now in its fifth year. The U.S. Forest Service provided grants for the local trees, which include over 700 red mangrove trees to be planted along the Terra Ceia shoreline, to help protect the coastal land from erosion and to provide habitat and food sources for fish, shellfish, birds and wildlife. There are a dozen of these tree-plantings happening prior to Super Bowl XLIII set for the Raymond James Stadium on February 1. What’s cool about this year’s event is a new twist in the operations–long-term monitoring of the tree plantings so the NFL can begin to actually track the environmental impact.  Other facets of the NFL Environmental Program include food recovery at the stadium, donating decorations and building materials to local nonprofits, using renewable energy on game day, collecting books and sports equipment for local kids and buying carbon offsets for players and officials travelling to the game. And you thought it was all about the commercials…

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Football season is officially back, and the Philadelphia Eagles are pushing the whole green theme hard with the announcement today that they’re the first team in the NFL to be powered by wind. Thanks to a recent purchase of 14 million Kilowatt-hours of wind power from Native Energy and MCEnergy, the team is running its whole NovaCare Complex training facility and Lincoln Financial Field from Sustainable Energy.

This may be a good time to note that I absolutely despise corporately-named fields. They are so clodding and ugly-sounding. With the exception of Wrigley Field. Continue.

Philly mayor Mike Nutter (who has an insanely amazing name) has now appointed Eagles owner Christina Lurie to the city’s Sustainability Advisory Board. She’ll be helping make the city the greenest in America. Not a bad start to the season, not at all…

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We all know the three R mantra of the environmental movement (a tad more logical than the three “R”s in education, since only one of those actually starts with the letter). And a few of us have even heard the catchy little Jack Johnson tune about those 3 Rs more often than we’d care to admit. But there’s passing-clothes-down-to-a-younger-sibling reusing, and there’s wearing-the-same-freaking-shirt-for-four-years reusing. The latter is what a now 12-year-old Ridgefield, Conn. boy David Witthoft did after receiving a Brett Favre jersey for his birthday in 2003. His parents, bowing to his stubborn style choice, simply washed and mended the thing to keep it wearable. The boy didn’t see an actual Green Bay Packers game until Dec. 2007, and is planning to attend the Sept. 8 game when the Packers retire Favre’s No. 4 jersey. Besides the silliness of this story getting far too much national news play, is the hidden green one. Maybe we don’t all have the “sticktoitiveness” of young David, but his obsession offers a lesson in just how durable our clothing is when we actually wear it out.

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