Green monsters: the new sustainable stadiums

As the world focuses its atten­tion on the spec­ta­cle of the Lon­don Sum­mer Olympic Games, we are glued to the tele­vi­sion in awe of the ath­letic prowess, cer­e­mo­nial majesty, and sheer enor­mity of this mas­sive endeavor. How­ever, host­ing major events like the Olympics requires a huge invest­ment of money and resources behind the scenes and often results in neg­a­tive envi­ron­men­tal impacts.

Hap­pily, Lon­don has set a new stan­dards for green tech­nol­ogy and infra­struc­ture in part by estab­lish­ing a global stan­dard for sus­tain­able event man­age­ment – ISO 20121. Orga­niz­ers also devel­oped a “food vision” pro­gram that main­tains sus­tain­able sourc­ing stan­dards for the more than 14 mil­lion meals that will be served at the Games.

In a New York Times inter­view with David Stubbs, the head of sus­tain­abil­ity for the Lon­don Olympic Orga­ni­za­tion Com­mit­tee, Stubbs explained that sig­nif­i­cant atten­tion has been given to the long-term legacy and role of the Olympic struc­tures after it was pre­dicted that the embod­ied car­bon of con­struc­tion mate­ri­als would cre­ate the largest impact on the Games’ car­bon footprint.

As a result, tem­po­rary, recy­clable struc­tures were erected for venues that would not be of long-term use to the city. Addi­tion­ally, the per­ma­nent venues that were con­structed uti­lize the lat­est in green tech­nol­ogy and aware­ness: sus­tain­ably sourced tim­ber, recy­cled con­struc­tion mate­ri­als, light­weight roofs that save thou­sands of tons of steel in their design, exten­sive nat­ural light­ing, and even rain­wa­ter harvesting.

Aes­thet­i­cally, the sta­di­ums appear to be the same world-class struc­tures that we’re used to see­ing at the Olympics. Most peo­ple won’t real­ize the enor­mous amount of atten­tion Lon­don has given to its green sta­di­ums, but the design and con­struc­tion of these mon­u­ments reflect about a decade’s worth of sus­tain­abil­ity research and thought.

This raises the bar for other events, and begs the ques­tion: how green are our sta­di­ums here in the United States? Very few peo­ple, when attend­ing a major enter­tain­ment or sport­ing event, think about how green the sta­dium is or what impact the event they are at will have on the envi­ron­ment. But they should. Sta­di­ums are enor­mous struc­tures that uti­lize immense amounts of energy when they put on events for thou­sands of indi­vid­u­als con­sum­ing food, paper mate­r­ial, and water. We don’t always think about the water required to keep fields green, or the mil­lions of light­bulbs that go into those enor­mous video boards, or the fact that car­bon emis­sions per team per game (in terms of travel, energy use, con­ces­sions, etc.) can be up to 716 tons. That’s around 17 times the amount of an aver­age Amer­i­can house­hold expends every year.

There is hope. Sta­di­ums are becom­ing increas­ingly greener in the United States. More and more facil­i­ties are turn­ing to energy-efficient tech­nolo­gies such as solar pan­els and wind tur­bines for energy, increased use of recy­cled mate­ri­als for things rang­ing from con­struc­tion mate­ri­als to pro­grams, and the intro­duc­tion of water man­age­ment sys­tems. Some teams, such as the Philadel­phia Eagles, have made incred­i­ble leaps in terms of sus­tain­abil­ity; 100% of the power used dur­ing home games comes from wind tech­nolo­gies. The Nat­ural Resources Defense Coun­cil has even put together a guide for clubs and sta­dium own­ers look­ing to imple­ment the use of solar energy.

Here in New York, we’re not doing too poorly. The MetLife sta­dium is made of more than 40,000 tons of recy­cled steel, aims to cut water con­sump­tion by a quar­ter through the use of low-flow toi­let fix­tures and water­less uri­nals, and uses eco-friendly mate­r­ial for con­ces­sions.  The new sta­dium is more than twice the size of the old sta­dium (in terms of square footage), yet there’s been a reduc­tion of energy usage by almost 30%. And the total car­bon foot­print of games is much lower com­pared to other teams due to wide­spread use of pub­lic transit.

Sta­di­ums can always be greener, though. Whether you’re a die-hard sports fan, or a con­cerned cit­i­zen, or both, it’s impor­tant that you let your home team know how impor­tant it is to you that they keep up the good work. In terms of sus­tain­abil­ity, we’re not strik­ing out… but we’re not hit­ting a home run, either.

Find out more about New York teams’ green ini­tia­tives by vis­it­ing the sus­tain­abil­ity web­sites of the Yan­kees, the Mets, and the Giants.

Images cour­tesy of run​ner​slife​.co​.uk, thetechjour​nal​.com, and eco​-struc​ture​.com.