Serving up a greener U.S. Open
Posted on August 25th, 2009
By: Nathanial Gronewold
GreenWire: The nation’s premier tennis tournament will launch tomorrow, along with a significantly expanded effort to reduce the often enormous environmental impacts of mass sporting events.
Organizers of the U.S. Open are building on lessons learned from last year in an effort to green an event that hosts the equivalent of a Super Bowl every day for two weeks.
Fans attending the qualifying rounds tomorrow at the U.S. Tennis Association’s Billie Jean King National Tennis Center may notice a few changes. For one, the limited solid waste recycling program launched in 2008 has been expanded to include some 500 can and bottle receptacles throughout the 42-acre site in Queens.
“We learned a lot from that small pilot about changes that we needed to make, infrastructure in the building, to make sure that it will be a smoother operation now that we’re site-wide,” said Joe Crowley, USTA’s senior director of operations.
And attendees also will face an endless volley of messages urging them to take public transportation to park in Flushing Meadows and to take other steps to protect nature. USTA will even distribute 2,000 free round-trip subway cards to audience members once the championship series gets under way Aug. 31.
Behind the scenes, a new food composting project has been set up in the kitchen and dishwashing areas, and site managers have spent big to retrofit the stadiums with equipment to better divide solid waste from recyclables and streamline collection. And all paper, including napkins and paper plates, is made from bleach-free recycled materials.
The green push hasn’t resulted in any huge cost savings over business-as-usual approaches, Crowley admits. But with public awareness of the need for better environmental stewardship, and with market forces coalescing to make eco-friendly options more cost competitive, USTA officials say they have no intention of pulling back if savings are only seen in the long term.
“Now that we have the infrastructure in place, at least from a recycling standpoint, that will be commonplace from here on in,” said Crowley.
Expanding the effort
USTA officials said they have already been engaged in some environmentally friendly practices for a few years. Facilities managers have been just as keen as other building operators to keep energy efficiency to a maximum, to help hold down costs. And cardboard boxes have been recycled for some time now.
But in 2008, organizers decided to go beyond these few things to see what more could be done. Given the scale at which the U.S. Open runs for a relatively short time, officials recognized that they faced challenges not seen with other sporting events, but also faced interesting opportunities.
Over the tournament’s two-week run, an estimated 730,000 fans will cycle through the National Tennis Center for this year’s Open. Another 1,500 reporters will be on hand to follow some 300 separate players and their countless matches. An average 70,000 fans are expected to be on site per day.
While perhaps following the general enthusiasm for all things green, Rita Garza, senior director of corporate communications, said her team members were very wary of slipping up on their first try.
“We did not want to be guilty of greenwashing or launching any false programs, and we didn’t know what we didn’t know,” said Garza.
So USTA decided to hire James Margolis and the consultancy Environmental Resources Management to help design a system. The tennis association also teamed up with the Natural Resources Defense Council to help with locating vendors that could handle any specific recommendations ERM made.
ERM looked at everything USTA operations officials could come up with — water usage, energy consumption, and even the types of pesticides and cleaning agents used. But ultimately, ERM advised the tournament players to focus on just five areas for the time being: recycling, energy, transportation, paper products, and fan outreach and messaging.
There are limits to what can be achieved. Officials had wanted to maximize recycling, but were advised that paper products used for food service can’t actually be recycled after use, as they become contaminated with food waste. But in 2008, bins were set up throughout the main facility, Arthur Ashe Stadium, where fans could separate plastic and aluminum from other trash.
USTA officials say they also struggled to find a way to recycle 17,000 to 20,000 tennis ball cans that will get disposed of over the next few weeks.
Sports equipment manufacturer Wilson worked with the tennis association to make the pressurized cans as easy to recycle as possible, but one specific design feature of the cans — a metal rim atop the plastic tube that helps create the airtight seal — was particularly difficult to get past.
Garza says that, through NRDC’s advice, they were eventually able to connect with the New York City government’s recycler of choice, Sims Group, which had the equipment at its New Jersey facilities that was necessary to slice the rim off. Thanks to the extra time and investigation effort, now all U.S. Open tennis cans will be recycled, USTA says.
Organizers see advantages
Other green touches have been added or enhanced for the 2009 Open.
Following on the recycling pilot program, Crowley and his team have set up composting equipment in the kitchen and dishwashing areas, to see if they can collect as much food waste as possible to be used later as fertilizers for local farms. Again, their focus is on capturing material at the front end of the process, rather than trying to get visitors to cooperate in separating food from other material. Some menu items are also being sourced from nearby Long Island farms.
Other management features have been streamlined to save energy, space and money. IBM helped push the number of servers USTA uses for its information technology systems down from 60 separate servers to just six, netting huge savings in electricity use.
USTA says it will also purchase some 2,000 megawatts’ worth of renewable energy certificates (RECs) sourced from wind farms, an amount it hopes will be enough to offset all the power used at the U.S. Open with renewable energy.
The players themselves will also notice a more environmentally conscious Open. Recycling bins can be found in the locker rooms. And 53 percent of the cars provided by Lexus to shuttle the players from their hotels to the site will be hybrid vehicles, up from 20 percent in 2008.
Billie Jean King, Venus Williams and other tennis stars are helping out with fan outreach. But thus far, the fans have seemed equally enthusiastic, with high levels of cooperation in the 2008 recycling pilot.
Though other sports associations have taken notice, USTA officials wonder if there is something different about the U.S. Open, and tennis in general, that makes environmental initiatives work particularly well.
Unlike with football or baseball, the association believes a substantial number of U.S. Open fans actively play tennis themselves, bringing them closer to the game.
And rather than hosting a single game or a series of games involving teams at different locations, the top USTA event is condensed to just a few weeks per year and held at the same place every year, though on a massive scale. That gives officials months to prepare and a few weeks to execute, affording some advantages that the Super Bowl, World Series or NBA Championship may not enjoy. (This year’s open runs Aug. 31-Sept. 31, following this week’s qualifying round.)
“We have such a vast opportunity as the USTA and U.S. Open to reach all of these different touch points, and that, I think, is what makes us a little unusual,” said Garza.