Welcome back fellow sports enthusiasts! After our introductory posts, I am sure that many of you are curious to know more about the types of pollution produced by the major sporting events that we all love. In this week’s post, we will be talking about the general types of pollution produced by all major sporting events before diving deeper into the environmental impacts of specific sporting events in the next few weeks.
One of the biggest forms of pollution from major sporting events is the carbon emissions involved in traveling long distances using the most energy-intensive forms of transport such as flights and cars. As the spectators of such events usually include people from all around the world, thousands of people travel to the destination of the sports event via long flights or car rides which are fuel-intensive, leading to massive amounts of carbon dioxide being released into the atmosphere. For example, an environmental analysis of the 2004 Football Association (FA) Cup found that “visitor travel to the event had the most significant impact and created an ecological footprint (EF) of 1,670 gha… this footprint result accounted for 54% of the total EF of the FA Cup Final” (Collins and Flynn, 2008).
source: McCarthy (n.d.)
Another significant form of pollution from major sporting events is food pollution, creating an EF of 1,413 gha which is “five times greater than that for visitors at their home location over the same time period” according to an academic paper by Collins and Flynn (2008). Statistics in their paper further show that “individual food items that were consumed in large amounts, namely meat products, were highly processed and required substantial amounts of resources and energy to produce” (Collins and Flynn, 2008). Moreover, there is often an excess of food provided which gets wasted as it is hard to predict how much food a large crowd of people would consume. The consumption of food at these events also leads to plastic pollution as the fast-food provided at these events often come in large amounts of plastic packaging and plastic cutleries. Thus, food and plastic make up an alarming amount of pollution and waste produced by major sporting events.
I hope you have learned more about the severity of carbon, food, and plastic pollution caused by major sporting events after this post! In the next post, Eunice will be talking more about some other types of pollution caused by these events so stay tuned!
Cheers,
Natasha
References
Collins, A. and Flynn, A. (2008). Measuring the Environmental Sustainability of a Major Sporting Event: A Case Study of the FA Cup Final. Tourism Economics, 14(4), pp.751–768.
McCarthy, T.C. (n.d.). Travel size emissions – ND Cartoons. [online] Newsday. Available at: https://projects.newsday.com/cartoons/data/travel-size-emissions/ [Accessed 12 Sep. 2020].