The Super Bowl with its pricey ads, half-time entertainment extravaganzas, and booming business in merchandise is a grand celebration of consumerism. But this year, the NFL is admitting as much:
They're working to offset the event's sizable carbon footprint -- a whopping 500 tons of greenhouse gases.
The league's Jack Groh tells NPR that the event's footprint doesn't even include flights for teams and fans or the greenhouse gases produced by vendors, hotels and ancillary industries. It only calculates the carbon emissions of its utilities and transportation (a 3,000-vehicle fleet of buses and limos that serve players and bigwigs the week leading up to the Sunday game).
The NFL has four strategies for offsetting its carbon output:
• Using renewable energy to power the stadium and adjacent NFL Experience themepark: wind, geothermal, solar, and some landfill-gas electricity
• Undertaking reforestation projects in Arizona, including some urban reforestation in Phoenix and around 84 acres outside the city
• Solid waste recycling
• Requiring affiliates to use vendors on an approved list of local women- and minority-owned businesses. In addition to the economic impact, the local requirement means the reduced use of petroleum for shipping goods in from out of state.
The Arizona Republic has more.
Earlier: Carbon-neutral choreography