Socially Responsible Sports

One might ask: Is it possible to have socially responsible sports?

One may reply: No.

But they won't if they are aware of initiatives sports teams around the nation have been carrying out in an attempt to alleviate their impacts on the environment, small doses at a time. In fact, just recently the Commissioner of MLB professional baseball, Bud Selig, spoke of the sport's responsibility to uphold social values and to combat social problems that its fans care about. 

Because of the social awareness of the MLB in particular, there are already several teams making changes to current operations around their stadiums, to reap the benefits of not only helping to improve their environmental impact, but to improve the impact that has on their wallets.  Such organizations have reduced costs while they have implemented programs like recycling efforts, which have proven successful enough to have reduced landfill waste by 200 million pounds per stadium, in some cases.  The Seattle Mariners have done so, and through their process of revamping operations a bit, they have also been able to achieve a rate of 80% recycling/composting of the total byproducts of their stadium operations, no small feat. 

In fact, 14 of 30 MLB teams have already voluntarily joined The Green Sports Alliance, an organization dedicated to "cleaning up" professional sports nationwide.  Basically, the organization's aim is to ever-improve the environmental performance of sporting facilities and their operations.  There are experts in environmental fields working right alongside experts in sporting management to come up with innovative improvements to current standards, which is a concept any green-minded individual will come to love. 

At the end of the day, you gotta love giant, powerhouse organizations changing ways to better our world, for today, and for the future generations.