The Office - Sports

In spite of the fact that practicing sports is in most cases both beneficial for body and soul it does not always mean that sports or interest in sport is environmentally friendly. An example of this is large football games where the typical football fan consumes sodas, beer and fast food of various types. This are mainly highly processed foodstuffs that need much energy for their production.

Let’s take as an example the English Cup Final in the year 2004 at the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff. The 73 thousand fans of Manchester United and Millwall consumed totally 37,624 sausages, 26,965 sandwiches, 17,998 hot dogs, 12,780 hamburgers, 11,502 bags of chips and 23,909 portions of french fries. All this was washed down with 203,494 liters of beer, 21,422 of cider, 12,452 bottles of wine, 90,481 aquavits and 63,141 bottles of alcoholic sodas.

After the celebrations in Cardiff were over there were 37,000 tons of glass, 8 tons of paper and 11 tons of food leftovers on the street. It was not possible to recycle any of this.

The biggest environmental impact of the Cup Final was through the traveling involved. Fans traveled an average distance of 590.5 km each – 47% by car, 34% via train and the rest with buses and large SUV´s.