Green Giants
How big venues are rethinking food waste
This article also appears in the Oct 2017 issue of Hyperlink, a new magazine focused on the intersection of media, technology, commerce, and culture. Hyperlink is published by Winning Edits. To purchase the Oct 2017 issue, go to hyperlinkmag.com.
By David Grabowski
Step into any large event center in America, be it a sports venue or multipurpose center, and you’re probably not thinking about what happens behind the scenes. After all, that’s not why you’re there; you’re there for the big game, the car show. But the sheer scale and foot traffic of a single venue can create ripples, and the stone making the largest splash is waste.
The 2017 Green Venue Report found that an average venue pumps out 1,155 metric tons of waste per year. Considering that up to 40 percent of American food is wasted, busy event centers can account for a sizable chunk of that number, yet only 56 percent donate food on an ongoing basis. While these statistics are depressing, the reality is an opportunity: the chance for venues to reduce waste and set examples by doing so. Their impact could be gigantic.
Over the years, the idea of sustainability has undergone transformation for venues, shifting from marketing quip to philosophical imperative. The focus on food sustainability specifically has increased, and almost three-fourths of venues now monitor food waste. The Green Sports Alliance was formed in 2010 specifically to monitor and reduce wasted food from sports venues, and the National Hockey League now mandates food donation for all thirty of its franchises.
This new era is marked by the emergence of the “sustainability coordinator,” a job title that will soon be ubiquitous at event centers, but was rare even a decade ago. One such coordinator is Ryan Harvey, Sustainability Coordinator at the Oregon Convention Center (OCC) in Portland. “We’ve graduated from that ‘top it off with a little bit of sustainability talk’ mentality, and now it’s much deeper, and deeply ingrained in what we do,” says Harvey. For Harvey, food sustainability is simply about taking the time to think about it. “Just because we’re busy — we’ve got to plate this lunch and there’s 1,500 people out there and they’re hungry . . . You’ve got to make room for it.” The OCC donated 23 tons of food last year and composted 200 tons. “Of course, it wasn’t like that even five years ago here, let alone ten or twenty,” Harvey adds.
A little more than half of venues send wasted food to compost or other offsite management. If that food instead sits in landfills, high levels of methane — a potent greenhouse gas — are produced, alongside undesirable impacts like groundwater pollution. Composting is an efficient backup plan, but it’s still not an ideal fate for food that could have been eaten. The answer is increased efficiency at the source. Harvey puts it this way: “Our long-term goal at the convention center is to divert 80 percent of waste out of the landfill. We’ve stalled out a bit, to be honest with you . . . that’s because our kitchen has gotten much better about [not] wasting food. Our composting numbers have actually gone down.”
Many venues are also re-evaluating how they serve food. “[There’s] an increase in planning for meals, as well as more creative solutions like even just plating food a little bit differently,” Harvey says. Timing a buffet correctly, for example, is critical. If a tray sits out too long, it must be thrown out; waiting to refill a tray until it’s vacant can eliminate unnecessary waste. But plated meals often produce less food waste to begin with, so many event centers avoid buffets altogether.
When food must be thrown away, venues are taking control of the process. The OCC uses sustainability stations at the end of its meals so that waste can be sorted immediately into compost, waste, and recycling bins, and other venues are following suit. Some even elect for on-site composting, like MetLife Stadium, home of the New York Jets and Giants. Compostable materials are tossed in a composter after games and converted into mulch; this saves an estimated $20,000–$25,000 annually.
Venues are not only changing how they deal with wasted food; they’re reevaluating the processes for sourcing food. Sacramento’s Golden 1 Center sources 90 percent of its food from a 150-mile radius, and some venues are shrinking that radius to a fraction of a mile. Fenway Park (home of the Boston Red Sox) installed a 5,000-square-foot garden on its roof in 2008; the produce is used by vendors inside the stadium. The Huntington Convention Center in Cleveland takes that concept one step further with an on-site working farm, complete with 800,000 honeybees and twenty-nine chickens.
While food sustainability remains of major concern, event centers are stepping into other arenas to minimize their footprints. The Oregon Convention Center is leading the movement. It is the largest convention center in the Pacific Northwest, hosting an estimated 400 events per year and over one million guests, and it was the first convention center in the world to earn a LEED certification in 2004. It upgraded to LEED Platinum in 2014, the highest certification available. Its roof is one of the highest-producing solar panel arrays of any US convention center, with which it creates a quarter of its energy.
An event center isn’t a random bulge of commerce; it’s a swell of activity within the community it inhabits. Venues need that communal spirit in order to meet the most daunting challenges, like shrinking food waste.
The city of Portland itself is at the heart of the OCC’s ethos. “People here know that a big part of what has made this place is our dependence upon and relationship with the environment,” says Harvey. “We realize a large part of the bread and butter is the natural space that we therefore want to protect. [The] decisions that we’re making kind of stem from that.” Portland itself predisposes the OCC to success. Public light rail stops right outside the OCC’s door; the city recycles roughly 64 percent of business and consumer waste; and specific recycling streams make it easier to recycle on a large scale. The OCC donated twenty-two tons of usable goods in 2016.
“There are so many nonprofit organizations around that are trying to repurpose and reuse things,” says Harvey. “Last week we sent two pallets worth of old computer servers down to a nonprofit called Free Geek . . . [which] invites young people into their space to teach them how to work on computers.”
Convention centers aren’t the only operations with greener practices; more sports venues are accelerating their greening efforts: retrofitting lighting fixtures, upgrading HVAC systems, and implementing better recycling programs. And new centers are being built with sustainability in mind. Brooklyn’s Barclays Center was built in 2012 with a green roof that absorbs rainwater and insulates sound. The Golden 1 Center opened in 2016 with a LEED Platinum certification, and is the first major indoor sports venue to earn that accreditation. It’s a clear incentive: saved energy, less waste, lower costs.
Harvey says there’s only so much an event center can do, however, without the support of the community. In the Green Venue Report, the venues surveyed cited a lack of composting partners and the cost and availability of sustainable foods as blockers to their progress. An event center isn’t a random bulge of commerce; it’s a swell of activity within the community it inhabits. Venues need that communal spirit in order to meet the most daunting challenges, like shrinking food waste. “Part of sustainability is environmentally based,” says Harvey. “But part of it should be economically based, as well as socially based.”
He calls it “the triple bottom line,” and alignment with that bottom line represents the future: event centers in symbiotic relationships with their environments and communities.
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