As we all know, summer is peak sports and entertainment season, with concert tours, baseball games, plus Club World Cup® soccer matches being played in 12 U.S. cities. The arenas that host these events for fans like me generate a lot of waste, including drink bottles and cans, food containers, cardboard and more.

You may have seen news recently announcing Circular Solutions’ partnership with the Green Sports Alliance (GSA) and its Foundation. GSA harnesses the power of sports, music, and entertainment to drive environmental change. This new partnership is a game changer for recycling.

Everybody Wins

Green Sports Alliance’s Play to Zero platform is a leadership recognition platform and sustainability performance toolkit for GSA Members that guides and celebrates progress towards a net zero energy, net zero water, zero waste, and a more resilient future.

Play to Zero is helping collegiate and professional teams, major venues, nonprofits, and corporations achieve their goals, and we want to encourage more organizations to participate. So, CS is donating 10 percent of all new engagements with GSA-member clients to the Green Sports Alliance Foundation, directly supporting the foundation’s mission to catalyze environmental progress across the sports and entertainment world.

Verification Builds Trust

Trust takes more than good intentions. Many venues are doing great work to collect recyclable materials to prevent them ending up in landfills or incineration. The problem is, often items organizations think they’re recycling actually don’t make it all the way through the process to create new bottles and cans, for example, from used ones.

That’s where Circular Solutions comes in. Our team is using tech-driven solutions to help venues verify their efforts at every step in the process—from the location to the hauler to the material recovery facility—so they can substantiate their results and report their real metrics that can’t be manipulated. In our experience, tools and technology are providing the edge organizations need to dispel doubt and show the effectiveness of their efforts with proven data that is beyond reproach. Often organizations can reduce their waste management costs in the process.

A Sporting Chance

Recycling at sports and entertainment venues is not just about managing trash—it’s about reducing environmental impact, meeting stakeholder and regulatory expectations, and reinforcing their role as a community leader.

This new partnership and our proprietary technology is giving recycling a sporting chance–to make sure the values central to sports, including honor and fairness, truth and transparency, are also giving recycling a fighting chance to succeed, and fans a chance to make a difference for the environment.