How the Super Bowl goes green
By Erik Siemers
Business Journal staff writer
There’s Lynn Swann’s leaping catch, John Riggins’ touchdown scamper, William “The Refrigerator” Perry’s endzone dive, and Scott Norwood’s heartbreaking missed field goal.
Yet somehow in the pantheon of seminal Super Bowl moments, the great recycling initiative of Super Bowl XXVIII in Atlanta gets overlooked.
“Even the greatest greening programs on Earth often times get lost in the shuffle,” said Jack Groh, environmental program director for the National Football League.
Super Bowl XLVI this February in Indianapolis’ Lucas Oil Stadium will mark the NFL’s 19th year of instituting environmental initiatives at the world’s largest and most high-profile annual sporting event.
It’s OK with Groh, the guy charged with organizing sustainability initiatives around the league’s special events, that those efforts get lost in the enormity of the game.
Getting noticed isn’t the point.
“We’re not doing it for that reason. We didn’t do it as a PR campaign," said Groh. "We did it as part of our operations. Environmental principals are about greater efficiency and reduction of waste. How is that not a good business practice?”
That message resonated in Portland this week, where Groh was among the featured speakers in the first-ever Green Sports Summit.
The event was the product of the Green Sports Alliance, a nonprofit formed in March to work with sports teams and venues to enhance their environmental performance.
As one of the largest and most successful sports leagues in the world, the NFL took center stage at the event, where Groh was joined by David Krichavsky, the NFL’s director of community affairs.
That such an event exists at all is testament to how far the world of professional sports has come in embracing sustainability.
“If you tried to have a similar conference five years ago, it would have been a small conference,” Krichavsky said by phone Wednesday from New York after returning from the summit. “It’s a cause that has a tremendous amount of resonance and a tremendous amount of power, mostly because of all the eyeballs on the sporting world.”
No event gets more eyeballs, of course, than the Super Bowl.
Last year’s game at Cowboys Stadium in Arlington, Texas, was watched by 162.9 million viewers, making it the most watched show in U.S. television history, according to The Nielsen Co.
Just like the industry as a whole, the NFL’s sustainability programs at the Super Bowl have evolved over time.
Groh came on board in 1993 to prepare for the next year’s Super Bowl in Atlanta.
“If you go back to 1993 and if you mention environmental to people, about the only two topics that would pop-up in public arenas would be solid waste or air pollution,” he said.
So the NFL addressed what it knew, launching the first recycling project at a major professional sports event.
It was somewhat arcane by today’s standards.
While today sports venues may have dedicated bins for recyclable materials, back in 1994 Groh said the league brought the post-game trash bags to a loading dock, enlisted volunteers and began hand-picking recyclables.
“It wasn’t the most elegant solution you could have for that problem,” he said.
Naturally, as public awareness of environmental initiatives has expanded, so has the league’s repertoire of programs.
From recyclables it expanded into food waste, recovering extra food from stadium kitchens and donating it to local food banks. One Super Bowl netted as much as 93,000 pounds of food.
The league also recovers office supplies, equipment, and building materials used to prepare for the game and its ancillary events. The recovered and repurposed materials have been valued at around $250,000, Groh said.
And since Super Bowl XXXIX in Jacksonville, Fla., in 2005, the league has orchestrated an urban forestry initiative, planting 10,000 or more trees in and around the host city.
The event uses biofuels when available and some years the league works with corporate partners to acquire offsets to make up for the carbon output caused by team and league travel to the game. This year marks the second Super Bowl in which the league provides local event managers with a guide on how to make their operations more environmentally friendly.
And next year’s game in New Orleans marks the first time a host committee was required to have its own environmental plan when submitting its hosting bid.
“The return on investment for us can be as much as 600 percent,” Groh said.
To be clear, that isn’t a return that goes back to the NFL as profit.
The proceeds — newly planted trees, food donations, etc. — are to the benefit of the community.
Whether it’s seen on TV by the legions of football fans watching doesn’t seem to matter.
“We’re really doing this,” said Krichavsky, “because we think it’s the right thing to do.”
@ErikSiemers | esiemers@bizjournals.com | 503-219-3418
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