It was late on a Saturday afternoon, and believe it or not, Northwestern had just won a football game. The battle was over and the fans were gone, but one thing remained: trash, and lots of it. Thousands of wrappers, bottles, cups, programs, you name it – all strewn across the
deserted aisles. For environmentalists like Communication freshman Elisa Redish, scenes like that are a little overwhelming. “You see trash bins overflowing,” says Redish, who has worked as an ice cream vendor at Ryan Field. “I don’t know, I guess it’s just frustrating when I go to the games.”
By the same time the next day, the seats were cleaned, the trash disposed of and the plastic bottles tossed – into Dumpsters. That’s because there is no can or bottle recycling at any of the NU athletic playing facilities. “It’s sort of catching up with everyone now,” says Matt Krauss, the general manager of SodexhoUSA Sports and Leisure Services at NU. Stadiums are quickly becoming outdated. With vending areas not equipped to handle the CO2 hookups required to serve fountain drinks, the majority of beverages sold at games come in plastic bottles.
Take, for example, the September 1, 2007, football game against Northeastern. With just 16,199 fans in attendance, NU sold 15,576 bottles of soda and 11,208 bottles of water-a total of 26,784 plastic bottles that would go unrecycled. (By contrast, 18,760 fountain beverages were purchased.) For Big Ten games against Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan, nearly 25,000 bottled sodas and waters were sold. Basketball games were not much better: At a sold-out game against Indiana on February 23, fans bought 954 bottles of soda, water and Gatorade, compared to 458 fountain drinks.
If Krauss had his way, the stadiums wouldn’t have to worry about recycling the thousands of bottles after each game; they would be using cups. “I would love to have fountain drinks everywhere,” he says. “I make more money on the fountain drinks than I do on bottles.” The cups will still end up as waste, but Krauss has a solution for that, too. NU currently uses paper cups that are provided for free by Pepsi, its official soft drink provider at sporting events. But Krauss is looking into biodegradable, corn-based cups from a company called Fabri-Kal that break down within 10 years, even in a landfill. Implementing this plan could lead to a rise in beverage prices, but as long as the same number of drinks are sold, Krauss says, Sodexho and the university would likely give their approval.
In recent years, NU has been part of a college-campus environmental revolution. It has invested in alternative energy and purchased carbon offset credits. Next fall, a complete revamping of the campus recycling program will launch, but only on the Evanston campus and in administrative buildings. Even with this hypersensitivity to anything that isn’t gung-ho Go Green, most of the university’s vast improvements are conspicuously absent at Ryan Field and Welsh-Ryan Arena, leaving some wondering how NU athletics got left behind.
While the university’s facilities management department could play a role, it is ultimately the athletic department that bears the most responsibility. For the most part, athletics functions as a separate entity, independent from the rest of the university. The department has their own budget, runs their own facilities and has their own liaison to the president and provost – the athletic director. If game-day recycling and other green initiatives were to become a reality at NU sporting events, it is up to the athletic department to instigate the changes. “There’s a lot of different things that go into putting on an event here at Northwestern,” says Scott Arey, the assistant athletic director of facilities. “There’s only so many hours in the day and so many people on our staff. There’s not one reason why I can say, ‘Well, today we’re doing recycling,’ whereas we weren’t before.”
T o be fair, NU athletics has made a few environmental strides. The new playing fields at the lakeside Leonard Thomas Complex boast LED scoreboards, which use less power and feature stadium lighting with energy-efficient bulbs. At Ryan Field, all the cardboard used by vendors is recycled. And the university purchases energy credits to offset 20 percent of the power used in all its buildings, including sports venues.
With recycling containers already used across campus, it would seem fairly simple to expand that program to the football and basketball stadiums. Collegiate and professional teams across the country have embraced similar initiatives. At least five other Big Ten schools have recycling programs in place for football games – Penn State, Ohio State, Michigan, Minnesota and Michigan State.
No action has been taken thus far, though Arey says he recently contacted Aramark Higher Education, the company responsible for waste management at NU, about developing a recycling program for football games. It is simple enough to add recycling receptacles. And if there was no extra cost involved, Arey says, that would be the case. But once money becomes a factor, the bureaucracy takes over. “To get things changed around here, yeah, it does move at a slow pace,” Krauss adds. “But then again, a lot of large organizations are like that. Look at the City of Chicago. Have you ever tried paying a parking ticket?”
If additional funding were required to implement a recycling program, Arey would have to place a request to the senior associate director of athletics, who reports to the athletic director, who reports to the president. Facilities management would likely be involved as well, as it runs the recycling efforts on campus. In fact, putting any comprehensive plan in place would require coordination between many organizations: the facilities management crews who clean up after tailgaters in the parking lots, the student groups and day laborers who pick up trash in the stadium aisles the day after games and the subcontracted company that hauls away the waste. Then there’s the promoting: making sure fans are aware and take advantage of the new opportunities.
“There are definitely a lot of factors that can get in the way of trying to change something or trying to do something new,” says Julie Cahillane, NU’s manager of refuse and recycling. Seven years ago, Cahillane says the university tried to put a recycling system in place for tailgaters. But after too many fans ignored labeling signs above the Dumpsters, the initiative was scrapped. Arey says he is in the early stages of looking into establishing a program that would encompass all aspects of game day waste, including tailgates, stadium purchases and post-game cleanup. A plan like this would require the athletics department to get in touch with facilities management – something Cahillane says has yet to happen.
Many times, it is student groups that initiate such inter-departmental talks, says Director of Facilities Management Gary Wojtowicz. He suggests Students for Ecological and Environmental Development, Environmental Campus Outreach or Engineers for a Sustainable World make it a priority. The three groups are among the members of the new Sustainability Working Group, which works with facilities management and Sodexho on developing environmental strategies for NU. “There’s so much interest in greening Northwestern, and there’s many different people doing many different things,” says Weinberg junior Jesse Sleamaker, co-chair of SEED and a Daily columnist. “Sometimes it’s really difficult to connect the dots.”
Both Sleamaker and Environmental Campus Outreach co-chair Benjamin Singer, a Communication sophomore, say their groups would potentially be interested in helping with an initiative, which might be as easy as a combination of recycling bins and the proper use of cleanup crews. After games, a first wave of cleaners would collect recyclables and a second wave would pick up the rest of the trash. Such a program would be especially easy at basketball games, which take place in a far more controlled environment than footbal
l games and don’t have any of the tailgaters that can make things so complicated. “There’s definitely a different awareness now than there once was as far as environmental issues and disposal issues, so it’s a good time to try new things,” Cahillane says. Sodexho’s Krauss says he thinks it would be easiest to put bins next to garbage cans in the stadiums, which is a simple solution that Cahillane and Arey say could be ready by the fall if everyone were adequately prepared. In the end, the athletic department would have to take the lead.
But it seems the athletic department is not ready to make green changes. Arey has only taken the most preliminary of steps towards making recycling a reality at Ryan Field and Welsh-Ryan Arena, and he says he is not looking into doing anything else that would be environmentally friendly. “I’m not putting the responsibility on (facilities management) to make sure that we do it,” Arey says. “It’s something that we have to also make a priority for ourselves.” He adds that as much as he might like to do more eco-friendly programs – Cahillane suggests purchasing renewable energy credits to offset a football game – between the funding, the bureaucracy and the department’s other priorities, it would be difficult without receiving some additional help from the university administration..
In the end, any environmental progress at the stadiums may well come down to profitability: If the university can save money doing it, the change is that much more likely to happen. “When it comes down to it,” Krauss says, “the dollar is the ultimate green.”
