Seattle Mariners Partner with Composting Company to Improve Recycling Rate
It’s not news that MLB teams place an emphasis on recycling. That’s been the case for years, particularly since 2005, when MLB became the first professional sports league to partner with the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC). Yet even with the adoption of recycling and other ‘green’ practices, teams recognize there are improvements they can make and goals they can achieve. The Seattle Mariners are helping lead the way in that department by recycling and composting the bulk of the concession items they serve customers, a breakthrough in their recycling program.
Rather than send single-use products such as straws, cups and hot dog trays to the landfill, the Mariners now recycle and compost them. Other items which follow that process include pizza boxes, lids, cutlery, plates, drink trays and even waste bags provided to those in Safeco Field’s suites.
The Mariners became aware of the idea before the 2010 season via the San Francisco Giants, who increased their recycling rate at AT&T Park by 57 percent from 2008 to 2009. The manner in which the Giants accelerated their recycling program’s effectiveness, attaining a 75 percent rate in ’09, caught the attention of the Mariners.
While at an annual meeting with MLB operations executives prior to the ’10 campaign, the Mariners compared notes with the Giants to find out how that 57 percent figure had occurred. The Mariners discovered what was holding back their recycling rate, which stood at 38 percent at Safeco Field following the ’09 season.
“We realized that if we started to buy compostable service ware, we could eliminate the landfill component from the front of the house,” said Scott Jenkins, the Mariners’ Vice President of Ballpark Operations.
The Mariners began working with Cedar Grove Composting, a local waste management business, and through there opened a supply line to buy compostable products. The number of recyclable/compostable food service products approved by Cedar Grove has grown from 70 to over 600 in just a couple years, said Susan Thoman, Director of Public Affairs for Cedar Grove.
“They’re all the major manufacturers throughout the U.S. and internationally,” Thoman said of the companies which make the products that changed the Mariners’ recycling program. “They actually come to Cedar Grove to get their products tested for whether they can be composted in a commercial system.”
What the new service ware products meant to the Mariners was an increase from that 38 percent rate in ’09 to 70 percent for 2010. That figure improved to 79 percent for 2011. The uptick in recycling and composting allowed the Mariners to save $72,000 in landfill costs in ’10, according to Jenkins. The team will save $95,000 in landfill costs this year. The Mariners project the landfill weight diverted this year to be 974 tons, which is slightly under 2 million pounds. A 90 percent recycling rate is Jenkins’ next goal, which is a number that might not have seemed achievable in 2005.
The Mariners produced a 12 percent recycling rate that year. It rose to 18 percent in ’06, 25 percent in ’07 and 31 percent in ’08, a year in which Jenkins said they collected and recycled 4,000 tons of material at Safeco Field. That number shot up to 12,000 tons in 2010. By that point, the club had been charting its recycling program on spreadsheets or, as Jenkins called it, keeping score.
“It gave us the ability to benchmark our performance…to see who was performing well and to learn from those people,” Jenkins said.
That has been helped, in part, by MLB’s Green Tracks program. Through the partnership with the NRDC, Green Tracks provides a centralized data collection system for teams. They can input their recycling details, energy and water consumption, paper purchasing numbers and other critical metrics to understand what’s being consumed. From there, teams can figure out how to make their conservation efforts more efficient.
Source: The Biz of Baseball
By Kyle Stack