Play It Green

At the start of the baseball season, I was given a whole back-stadium tour of Fenway’s green initiatives, from the recycled napkins and extensive recycling bins to the solar panels adorning the roof. Bottled water may be the current bane of eco-snobs, but in a baseball stadium, there’s no getting around those pesky plastic bottles. Once you allow people to start bringing in containers, you get a lot more liqoured up fans. I have great appreciation  for the chanting and enthusiasm of the Red Sox crowd, but there are certainly a few college-agers who could stand to take it down a notch or three. Anyway, Fenway’s greenness.

The Red Sox are the first MLB team to use solar thermal energy. There are 28 solar panels replacing 37% of the gas needed to heat the stadium’s hot water:

The team (and all teams, presumably) go through crazy amounts of paper for each game, says Red Sox PR person Marty Ray–a 35-page pack of major league statistics for each team, a 15-page “game notes” handout for the players, printouts for sports broadcasters. They’ve been printing all but the broadcaster’s notes on double-sided paper now.

 A “Green Team” of college students collects recyclable trash, so fans don’t have to leave their seats to recycle (and anywhere from 25 to 85 college kids get to watch the games for free, not a bad trade on either end).

 Katie Haas, the Red Sox green coordinator, showed off the recycle bins, too:

And the best news for Red Sox fans who are shaking in fear over the possibility that the franchise will chuck their historical, small-seated stadium for a big, shiny new one, Haas said, “The greatest form of saving the environment is preserving this ballpark.”

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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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