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Posts Tagged ‘World Cup’

World Cup Jerseys Made From Recycled Plastic

Written by Chris Coletta | June 11th, 2010 | Add a comment
Nike's World Cup jerseys are made from recycled plastic bottles.

Here on the Team Earth blog, we wrote yesterday about the carbon footprint of this year’s World Cup and what some average folks are doing to make the sport of soccer more Earth-friendly.

But we forgot to mention what might be the most interesting green news to come out of the Cup. (Chalk it up to giddy excitement.)

What, pray tell, could be so cool? This year in South Africa, nine teams, including the United States, are wearing jerseys made out of recycled plastic bottles.

Nike, which created the jerseys, says that each polyester uniform is made from as many as eight bottles. According to the company, its suppliers sourced bottles from landfill sites in Japan and Taiwan – preventing nearly 13 million bottles from getting trashed.

Teams wearing the jerseys include Brazil, the Netherlands, Portugal, the U.S., South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, Serbia, and Slovenia.

Neat, right?

We’ve got to confess – we’re not so sure about the Yanks’ fashion sense here. (That sash? Really?)  But we can definitely get down with manufacturers that take environmental action.

Nike is hardly the only retailer to make eco-friendly clothes. Interested in learning more and greening your own wardrobe? Check out some tips from Slate on doing just that.

Photo: Nike

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What’s the Carbon Footprint of the World Cup? And How Can We Make It Smaller?

Written by Chris Coletta | June 10th, 2010 | Add a comment
Major sporting events like the World Cup can have a big carbon footprint.

(Throughout the World Cup, Team Earth will be presenting stories about sports and climate change.)

What’s the world’s biggest sporting event?

The World Cup. And it starts tomorrow.

Fans of the “Beautiful Game” (that’s “soccer” for those of you in the U.S. and “football” for everyone else) have had June 11 marked on the calendar for four years.  But what about fans of the environment?

We know we’re probably killing your buzz right now – who wants to think about the environmental impact of something as fun as the World Cup? – but one report estimates that the 2010 Cup will generate eight times the carbon of the 2006 event in Germany. Mostly, that’s because South Africa is a far-away destination. Getting hundreds of thousands of people there will generate a lot of carbon, mostly from the greenhouse gas emissions of people flying on planes.

Specifically, this year’s Cup will generate an estimated 2.75 million metric tons (about 3 million U.S. tons) of carbon. That, as the Guardian points out, is the equivalent of 6,000 space shuttle flights – or 20 cheeseburgers for everyone who lives in the United Kingdom. That’s a lot of climate change.

OK, deep breath.

The good news is that people are starting to recognize that we can take action to make the world’s greatest sporting event one of its greenest.

The United Nations Environment Programme is working with South Africa to ensure that the matches are as green as possible. There’s also this great story about attempts to find an eco-friendly design for the vuvuzela – the often-deafening horns that South African fans like to blow at soccer matches. Check out this story about a design company that’s turning aid boxes into soccer balls.

Some of these actions are small. Some of them could have a huge impact. The common thread is that people are responding to a real environmental problem – not by suggesting that we end the World Cup, but by suggesting that we do something to make it better.

That’s what Team Earth is about, too. Just like we don’t need to cancel the World Cup, we don’t need to drop off the grid to fight climate change. But we need to do something.

We’ve got six actions you can take in your everyday life to get started. Check them out.

Photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tikun/ | via Creative Commons

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