With 7 wins and 29 losses this season so far, the Minnesota Timberwolves have one of the NBA’s worst records, but their Target Center Arena is an environmental slam dunk. In 2009, the Timberwolves unveiled the first green roof in professional sports, which, at 2.5 acres, is also the fifth largest green roof in the United States. The roof cost $5.3 million to construct and is covered with plants native to the Minnesota prairie such as lupine, wild strawberry, and dotted blazing star, but it is more than an expensive garden. It is extremely durable (it should last 40 years) and is expected to capture about a million gallons of stormwater every year.1 The additional benefits of a green roof are explained this Greeniacs article: http://www.wordpress-837916-4114959.cloudwaysapps.com/GreeniacsArticles/Green-Roofs.html. The Target Center’s green roof is just one example of the ways in which sporting venues, traditionally big resource-wasters, are adopting winning strategies in the game of sustainability.
Sports stadiums have long wasted space, material resources, and energy. For example, the NFL Dallas Cowboy Stadium in Arlington Texas holds 80,000 people and uses the same amount of energy in one year as the entire city of Santa Monica, California (population 88,000) does in that same year.2 That is an astonishing 24,439,918 kilowatt hours per year for an arena whose team performs about five hours every other week. There is no public transportation in Arlington Texas either, so developers have made 30,000 parking spaces available for personal vehicles.
Fortunately, not all stadiums are such environmental outlaws, and changes as simple as switching from incandescent lighting to LED, or Low Emission Diode lighting, are turning losing stadiums into winning ones. First conceived in the 1960s, LEDs are finally entering mainstream commercial use, and a number of stadiums are using them to illuminate everything from walkways to jumbotron display screens. LEDs emit a much higher percentage of light in the desired direction3 than do regular bulbs, and the lighting efficiency of new LED light bulbs can be “more than eight times that of incandescent lights.”4 This is because ordinary light bulbs must generate a lot of heat to warm their filament, and most of this comes off as wasted energy. This lack of a filament also gives LEDs a much longer life span than incandescent light bulbs, which must be replaced once the filament burns out.
Many are conserving water by retrofitting their stadiums or arenas with waterless urinals, which do not require water to flush or control other hardware. Waterless urinals use replaceable cartridges that contain a liquid sealant which, because it is lighter than urine, creates a liquid seal that prevents odors from escaping.5 On average, one waterless urinal will save 20,000 to 45,000 gallons of potable water a year.6 If the average stadium seats 20,000 people, the majority of them male, and many of them full of overpriced beer—well, the merits of the waterless urinal are clear.
Stadiums and arenas are also adopting new ways of generating energy. In 2007, the San Francisco Giants installed the Major League Baseball’s first solar panels and a few months later the Cleveland Indians unveiled an “upper deck solar panel array.”7 Numerous others have followed suit and now derive some of their energy from solar or wind power. In their failed bid for the 2016 Olympic Games, Tokyo, Japan’s bid team even unveiled designs for the world’s first stadium to be powered entirely by solar energy.
It is Brazil, not Tokyo, who will be hosting the 2016 Games, so the world’s first solar powered stadium will have to wait. In the meantime, the Brazilian Olympic Committee will continue making environmental progress in its own way. As part of its Carbon Zero 2016 campaign, 3,000 trees were planted in Rio De Janeiro to offset the estimated 716 tons of carbon emitted by the bid team between September 2007 and October 2009.8 Other sports organizations now purchase credits to offset energy usage: Baseball team the Philadelphia Phillies purchased $250,000 worth of renewable energy credits to offset their ballpark’s utility power usage for all of 2008.9
If true energy efficiency is gained, a stadium might receive the ultimate in green street cred: LEED certification. LEED represents Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, and in 2009 the Washington Nationals became the first Major League Baseball team to play in a LEED certified arena. The Nationals organization earned certification by using recycled materials in 10% of their stadium and by installing an innovative stormwater filtration system.10 Atlanta’s Philips Arena, which hosts the NBA’s Atlanta Hawks and the NHL’s Atlanta Thrashers, was also awarded LEED certification late last year, as was the NBA Miami Heat’s American Airways Arena.11
Another reason the Washington Nationals’ stadium is LEED certified is because it is built on a reclaimed brownfield, which is an “abandoned or underused industrial and commercial facility available for re-use.”12 Later this year, the NFL’s New York Giants and New York Jets will also begin playing at a former brownfield site in the New Meadowlands Stadium, which was built using 40,000 tons of recycled steel, environmentally friendly concrete, and has seating made partially from recycled plastic and scrap iron.13 Incheon stadium in South Korea, built to host the 17th Asian games in September, will maximize land space in a different way: after the games, it will be transformed into a public park.14
“‘At the end of the day, the biggest contribution to [sports’] carbon footprint is people driving to the game,’ says Michel Gelobter, the founder and CEO of Cooler, an Oakland, Calif.–based software firm that tracks carbon footprints and reduction methods.”15 Like Cowboy Stadium, too many sporting venues are located in the suburbs, where they are out of reach of public transportation. Future developers should take note of Major League Baseball’s New York Mets and Atlanta Braves, who both play in stadiums accessible by public transport.
What is the future for greening stadiums? Developers should seek brownfield sites aggressively, and cities should consider subsidizing the efforts of those who build on them. Other incentive programs should be explored, too. Giving a free beer or hot dog to those who bike to games would reward environmentally responsible behavior and might help to revitalize attendance numbers, which are at their lowest in decades. Those who bike or drive electric cars should be given priority parking. Each professional sports league also needs to begin the arduous task of calculating its collective carbon footprint. While many venues are off to promising starts, the Environmental Hall of Fame remains far away for most.
