The great american past-time of baseball is going green.
Up until now, I guess the Green Monstah at Fenway Park has been the greenest thing about baseball…but that’s all a’changin’.
Unlike more cookie cutter type plans implemented by other sports teams, like the Philadelphia Eagles, the MLB’s "Team Greening Program" is tailored to each individual team and stadium.
Now that’s cool.
One of my favorite green blogs, GreenDaily, shared this story earlier this month.
Major League Baseball has partnered with the National Resources Defense Council to provide each team with it’s own NRDC Team Greening Adviser.
The awesomeness of this is that the advisers are not full time staffers with bloated salleries that need to be flown around the country on the gas guzzling jets.
Nope, it’s a "web-based software tool featuring advice and resources for every aspect of a Club’s operations". Now how cool is that?
Frances Beinecke, NRDC President, "Their work will save energy, reduce waste, and make the organization, the teams, and the stadiums all run more efficiently."
Some of the things the Team Greening Adviser tool will address are:
- Adopting an official environmental policy
- Incorporating environmental language into contracts, purchasing policies and requests for proposals that specify preferences for environmentally sound products and services
- Encouraging the use of renewable energy
- Providing information about how to credibly offset the carbon emissions related to team and fan transportation
- Using post-consumer recycled content paper for all paper products
- Implementing paper reduction strategies in offices
- Offsetting the environmental impact of up to half of team and employee travel
- Establishing club eco-committees
Check out more of the individual team efforts at the USA Today’s article on the team greening project.
How Can you Help Green Baseball?
- Get better gas mileage when driving to the games
- Maybe even use new "biodegradeable" motor oil made from beef by-products.
- Offset your CO2 emissions
I think every little step toward living green is an awesome one… but eco-snobbery sucks! My goal is to help newbies learn the most important steps toward living green — individually and collectively. Personally, I strive to have as little impact as possible on Planet Earth while I'm here.
