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Look Out For NFL Trees: The Super Bowl Goes Green

The NFL’s first serious attempt at a green Super Bowl did not go well.

“ All we did was recycle, and it was a disaster,” said Jack Groh, director of the league’s environmental program.

The year was 1994, when many special events paid little attention to recycling. The venue was the Georgia Dome. Groh, in his first year consulting with the league, found some volunteers and went about the task the hard way.

“ What we eventually decided on was taking all the bags of trash from the stadium, bringing them down to the loading dock, breaking them open, and then hand picking all the cans and the bottles out of this really disgusting and miserable garbage,” Groh said. “It was awful. It was inefficient. It was costly. It was time consuming. It was messy and dirty, and it didn’t yield enough of a return to make it worthwhile.”

The following year, the NFL came up with a mission statement: Make the Super Bowl greener, but do it using the same type of sound business practices that have helped make the game itself so popular.

As a result, the biggest of the big games has become more environmentally friendly with each passing year. The Indianapolis Colts’ victory over the Chicago Bears in Miami in January will be remembered by many as the first rainy Super Bowl, but Groh has another adjective for it: carbon-neutral.

“ Everybody and their uncle is starting to talk about being carbon-neutral and carbon mitigation,” Groh said. “Five years ago, before Al Gore was doing his power-point presentation, we already were trying to address it.”

The NFL’s list of eco-friendly measures from this year’s Super Bowl is long and impressive - and surprisingly cost-effective:

• Leftover food. Up to 60,000 pounds of extra food was left over from all the banquets, parties, and luncheons. These weren’t leftovers in the traditional sense - this was prepared food that was cooked in kitchens, but never made it out to the serving tables. The NFL distributed the food to soup kitchens, shelters, churches, and other organizations.

“ If you don’t recover it, it turns into 30 tons of garbage,” Groh said. “You’d have to pay to haul it to a landfill. You have to pay tipping fees and dump it there. It’s a pretty costly proposition to dispose of 30 tons of garbage.”

• Leftover stuff. Miami was decorated with 5 miles of fabric in the form of streamers, banners, and other decorations. The league could have filled a tractor-trailer or two - and a lot of landfill space - with its leftover office supplies, building materials and various other things bearing the Super Bowl logo.

“ Everything that could be salvaged, we would salvage it,” Groh said. “Inventory it, and distribute it primarily to local non-profits.”

• Recycling. The NFL recycled dozens of tons of cardboard at the stadium. (Drinks were served in plastic souvenir cups, so most people took them home.) Aluminum, plastic, glass, and mounds of paper were recycled at the media center, where some 3,500 reporters sifted through a week’s worth of news releases. Tons of wood was recycled from the NFL Experience theme park.

• Negating greenhouse gases: Two years ago, the NFL went to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee to find out how much carbon dioxide had been spewed into the atmosphere because of the Super Bowl in Jacksonville.

The answer wasn’t as bad as the league thought. For example, the ships used for temporary hotels didn’t count - they would have been pumping greenhouse gases on cruises elsewhere if not at the Super Bowl.

Still, the lab said that the NFL’s fleet of 2,000 vehicles and the electricity at the stadium helped contribute to a final tally of 1 million pounds of carbon dioxide.

“ They said in the big scheme of things, that’s not a lot of greenhouse gas,” Groh said. “But you guys made it, you guys are responsible for it.”

To make up for its mess, the NFL is planting 3,000 trees in the Miami area, mostly in large groups to maximize the carbon-negating effect. The most notable project is planned for next month, when 500 native species trees are to be planted to help reclaim the Dinner Key Spoil Islands near Miami.

Groh said the NFL spent only $2,500 on making this year’s Super bowl green. The league relied on local resources, volunteers, and donations from organizations such as the U.S. Forest Service. Groh said the league deliberately did not want to practice what he called “checkbook environmentalism,” in which a rich group simply writes a check and leaves town.”

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