We’ve had an exciting athletics season during the 23-24 academic year, and many of our football and basketball games have scored beyond the playing field. With the help of student and community volunteers, the Office for Sustainability was able to host a total of 10 Green Games across home basketball and football games.
What exactly are Green Games?
Green Games came about as a way to address the large amount of waste generated during athletic events, which is not surprisingly abundant in football and basketball stadiums. Our athletic arenas welcome many fans at each game - up to 14,000 at basketball games and averaging around 40,000 at football games. Volunteers help by keeping waste stations neat and ensuring that each item disposed goes to its proper waste stream - recycling, compost, or the landfill - thereby lessening the chance of contamination. After the games finish and the stadium clears out, volunteers “sweep the bowl”, walking across the bleachers to rescue recyclables and compostables from ending up with other trash!
So, how did our stats look?
At home football games, we had a total of 83 student volunteers who helped us divert almost 63,000 pounds of waste from the landfill. When it came to basketball games, 50 students helped us divert almost 3,100 pounds of waste. This total of 66,100 pounds of diverted waste could fill 190 of your typical outdoor trash bins. These boatloads of compostables and recyclables help UVA work towards its sustainability goal of reducing waste by 70% (from 2010 levels) by 2030!
We’re very grateful to the driven community of 133 volunteers that we have here at UVA, making Green Games a huge success this year. While many at the university are temporary residents of Charlottesville, they’ve been making lasting impacts that solidify sustainability as an important community value.
Green Games was so successful that we gained the attention of GFL Environmental, a waste collection service that operates in the Charlottesville area. Our goal was to hit 60,000 pounds of waste diverted throughout home football games, which we were able to achieve as we concluded the semester. GFL awarded the Office for Sustainability a $6,000 check to commemorate this exciting achievement, which student employees of the service learning team happily accepted on the field of our final football Green Game.
One final score of the season
In April we learned that John Paul Jones Arena won the Virginia Green Travel Star award for Most Innovative Project! As a certified Virginia Green Travel Partner, Zero-waste events at JPJ go beyond just Green Games. The Office for Sustainability also provided zero-waste support for the Dave Matthews Band concerts in November. We’re grateful for the recognition of this hard work and are committed to continuing the impactful work of zero-waste events like Green Games.
We’ve had an action-packed year with Green Games, but this is far from the end of our waste reduction efforts with UVA athletics. Plenty more Green Games are to come, and we’re excited to work with more volunteers to continue diverting waste and promoting sustainability within our community next year and beyond!
Gavin Crigger (he/him) is a rising 3rd-year student studying computer science and data science at UVA. He is a member of the service learning team of the Office for Sustainability, organizing volunteer opportunities like Corner Cleanups.