Author: Michelle

Conclusion: Consumer’s Responsibility

Sustainability in Commerce: Grow While Staying Green | Salesforce

Finally, we’ve come to the last post of my environmental blog on how we pollute! Throughout the past 12 weeks, we’ve looked at various ways in which consumers like you and I have been contributing to environmental pollution. This blog has made me come to realise that our daily activities, when accumulated over time and over space, has placed a lot of pressure on our environment. How then, do we advocate a consumers’ responsibility for the environment?

The university of Arizona (2019) has found that reduced consumption is better than a “green” consumption. This suggests that limiting the purchase of products reduces more environmental pollution as compared to purchasing products that are designed to limit environmental impacts. One argument that I have against this is that some products are essential in daily living. As such, reducing the consumption of these products may not necessarily be feasible. For example, looking back at week 2’s analysis on food consumption, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Singapore regulated that dining in was not allowed (Baker, 2020). As such, all residents who ordered food had to use takeaway boxes. Furthermore, as COVID-19 triggered a heightened sanitised environment, individuals were not allowed to use their own reusable containers or bottles to collect their food. Therefore, certain situations such as the pandemic prohibits the reduction of consumption.

Nonetheless, if the past 12 weeks have thought me one thing, it would be that the onus of reducing environmental pollution is on the consumers. Without consumers demand, production of  unsustainable products would eventually cease to exist. Thus, for luxurious products and services that can be forgone, it is our responsibility as consumers to avoid them for a better planet.

 

References

Baker, J.A. (2020) ‘Singapore’s circuit breaker and beyond: Timeline of the COVID-19 reality’, CNA. Available at: https://www.channelnewsasia.com/singapore/covid-19-circuit-breaker-chronicles-charting-evolution-645586 (accessed April 2022).

University of Arizona (2019) ‘Buying less is better than buying “green” — for the planet and your happiness’, ScienceDaily. Available at: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/10/191008155716.htm (accessed April 2022).

Mitigating Debris: How to Clean Up

International Space Station to retire by crashing into Pacific Ocean by 2031 | News | DW | 03.02.2022

In the last blog post, we explored outer space and the environmental pollution created through human activities. This post will look beyond the cause and effects of space debris and examine the ways in which federal agencies has implemented protocols and measures to reduce and mitigate the amount of space debris polluted in the Earth’s orbit.

Firstly, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has come up with a NASA Procedural Requirements document to define the roles and requirements needed for NASA and other relevant stakeholders to take steps to preserve the near-Earth space environment (NASA, 2017). The document outlines various guiding policies that ensure the limitation of the generation of orbital debris and the increased removal of existing debris. Furthermore, other federal organisations such as the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) have a significant role to play in reducing orbital debris as well. For example. the FCC implements restrictions on radio frequencies that may be used during space operations as the radio frequencies may cause malfunctions to the satellites (Migaud, 2020).  Additionally, the FCC also mandates that the telecommunications satellites that are operating within the geosynchronous earth orbit (a region of orbital patterns greater than 35,800 km above the earth’s surface) must exit the orbit or move into a storage orbit when the satellite’s operations are completed (migaud, 2020).

However, Migaud (2020) finds that these policies suffer from compliance issues as some of the regulations within the policies issued are not mandatory provided that the compliance of these regulations would exceed the financial capabilities of the launching parties. On another note, Garber (2017) provides an alternative solution to mitigate orbital debris, suggesting the idea of economic incentives to mitigate and remediate the debris.

Upon evaluation, NASA’s current procedural requirements regarding the mitigation of space debris is extensive and provides a detailed outline of the regulations that need to be followed to ensure minimal space pollution. Garber (2017)’s suggestion on economic incentives that follows successful economically-incentivised models such as the United State’s Emission Trading programme has a promising outlook. However, the unfortunate reality of this suggests that the economy weighs more significantly for the people as compared to the environment. Therefore, I believe that until we find a way in which humankind can operate in society and the economy while co-existing harmoniously with the environment, economic incentives may become unsustainable in the long run.

 

References

Garber, S.J. (2017) Incentives for Keeping Space Clean: Orbital Debris and Mitigation Waivers.

Migaud, M.R. (2020) ‘Protecting Earth’s Orbital Environment: Policy Tools for Combating Space Debris’, Space Policy, 52, 101361.

NASA (2017) NASA Procedural Requirements for Limiting Orbital Debris and Evaluating the Meteoroid and Orbital Debris Environments, National Aeronautics Space Agency.

Space Junk: What is it?

Space Junk: Is it a disaster waiting to happen?

When we think about environmental pollution, we often think about how our land, water and air have been polluted. However, there is little awareness and coverage of how much we have polluted in space.

Since 1957, with the launch of Sputnik, the world’s first artificial satellite, there has been a construction of of satellite infrastructure in the orbit, yielding a system of byproducts, otherwise known as space debris, or more informally as space junk (Rand, 2016). The space debris is mostly concentrated in the Low Earth Orbit (LEO) which is the region of space around Earth within an altitude of 160 to 2,000km where a large number of active satellites operate (Singh, 2020). Singh (2020) further argues that the high concentration of space debris in the LEO is dangerous as the debris could cause collisions, obliterating the existing spacecrafts in the orbit. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has estimated that there are about  21,000 pieces of space debris that are sized larger than a softball orbiting the Earth that could cause damage to spacecrafts (Singh, 2020). The large number of pieces of space debris in the orbit illustrate the severity of the problem that space pollution creates.

Furthermore, as atmospheric density decreases exponentially the higher the altitude, objects that are above 1000km would remain in the orbit for hundreds and thousands of years, a challenge that our future generations have to deal with (Crowther, 2002). As such, the question of inequitable environmental injustice remains, where we should question whether our decisions of space infrastructure construction has created environmentally pollutive impacts to communities that have no say in the matter.

 

References 

Crowther, R. (2002) ‘Space Junk–Protecting Space for Future Generations’, Science, 296, 1241–1242.

Rand, L.R. (2016) Orbital decay: Space junk and the environmental history of Earth’s planetary borderlands, University of Pennsylvania.

Singh, R. (2020) ‘Menace of Space Junk around Earth’, AKGEC International Journal of Technology , 11, 63–68.

Moving Forward: Air Pollution Data

China factories set up 'bubbles' to ride out Covid lockdowns | Financial Times

Hello! Welcome back to the last post of this week’s theme on COVID-19 and the environment. In the previous 2 posts, I have brought up various ways in which the pandemic has led to various increases in land pollution as well as decreases in air pollution. In this final post, we will be wrapping up the week with illustrating the abnormalities in the pollution data collected over the pandemic and what that could possibly mean for society moving forward.

Firstly. through observations during the pandemic, it has been found that while there has been a fall in NO2 pollution , there has been an increase in the concentration of O3 pollution (Venter et al., 2020). This is further substantiated by Brancher (2021), who found that NO2 reductions and O3 increases were consistently found over Vienna. Statistically, 82% of the lockdown days in Vienna had lowered NO2 concentrations and 81% of the days had amplified O3 concentrations (Brancher, 2021).

This phenomenon can be explained through figure 1 below, that illustrates ozone and aerosol formation. The green arrows in the figure illustrate primary emissions while the black arrows illustrate secondary emissions.

figure 1

Figure 1. (Kroll et al., 2020)

According to Kroll et al., (2020), when NOx levels are high, the system can become saturated, stilling the generation of ozone. The additional NOx becomes a sink for OH radicals, which slows down the oxidation of volatile organic compounds’ oxidation and thus suppresses ozone production. Furthermore, Kroll et al., (2020) suggests that the NOx can sequester O3 in temporary reservoirs such as NO2 and N2O5. Thus, this illustrates how the lowered NOx emissions may result in higher ozone levels for the environment. This shows how there are multitudes of complexities towards environmental pollution modelling and how the reduction of one particular pollutant may not necessarily be a good thing.

Moving forward, though the pandemic has been a terrible phenomenon for the world, there is an opportunity provided for atmospheric chemists to learn. Bourzac (2020) suggests that many researchers are using the environmental conditions created by the pandemic and the lockdowns to conduct experiments that were only plausible through complex computer modelling before the pandemic. Looking ahead, I hope that the data collected throughout the past two years of the pandemic will allow better policy implementation to reduce our environmental footprint in the coming years. While the pandemic has been awful to say the least, it is most important to relish the opportunities provided for a better and less polluted future.

References

Bourzac, K. (2020) ‘COVID-19 lockdowns had strange effects on air pollution across the globe’, Chemical & Engineering News, Chemical & Engineering News. Available at: https://cen.acs.org/environment/atmospheric-chemistry/COVID-19-lockdowns-had-strange-effects-on-air-pollution-across-the-globe/98/i37 (accessed March 2022).

Brancher, M. (2021) ‘Increased ozone pollution alongside reduced nitrogen dioxide concentrations during Vienna’s first COVID-19 lockdown: Significance for air quality management’, Environmental Pollution, 284, 117153.

Kroll, J.H., Heald, C.L., Cappa, C.D., Farmer, D.K., Fry, J.L., Murphy, J.G. & Steiner, A.L. (2020) ‘The complex chemical effects of COVID-19 shutdowns on air quality’, Nature Chemistry, 12, 777–779.

Venter, Z.S., Aunan, K., Chowdhury, S. & Lelieveld, J. (2020) ‘COVID-19 lockdowns cause global air pollution declines’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 117, 18984–18990.

Lockdowns & More Lockdowns: Was COVID-19 good for the environment?

Shanghai reports record asymptomatic COVID-19 cases as lockdown enters second day - CNA

Hello! Welcome back to the 2nd part on covid-19 and the environment! Today’s post will be looking at how there might be an upside to the Covid-19 pandemic in regards to environmental pollution.

During the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic, many countries across the world went into a state of lockdown, where people were not allowed to leave their homes for activities, with the exception of attaining necessities. This lockdown response had caused a slowdown in the global economy and subsequently, transportation activities (Venter et al., 2020). Venter et al., (2020) further finds a decline in the population-weighted concentration of ground-level nitrogen dioxide during the lockdown dates of 34 countries until 15 may 2020. As such, this suggests that the lockdowns implemented during the pandemic has reduced greenhouse gas emissions emitted during that time period. Furthermore, as industrial areas shut down, it has been observed that there have been decreased levels of criteria pollution such as carbon monoxide, methane, sulphur oxide, black carbon and particulate matter in the atmosphere (Ankit et al., 2021). As such, this further substantiates the idea that the Covid-19 pandemic and the regulations that follow have reduced the air pollution in the atmosphere.

However, lockdowns are clearly unsustainable practices that only provide short-term benefits. The lockdowns had evident economic repercussions of which the marginalised suffered the most from  (Bhattacharya et al., 2021; Sharma and Adhikari, 2020). As such, though the idea of a clear reduction in air pollution is exciting, there is a clear trade-off in this scenario that is unsustainable in the long run.

 

References

Ankit, Kumar, A., Jain, V., Deovanshi, A., Lepcha, A., Das, C., Bauddh, K. & Srivastava, S. (2021) ‘Environmental impact of COVID-19 pandemic: more negatives than positives’, Environmental Sustainability, 4, 447–454.

Bhattacharya, D., Bari, E., Khan, T.I., Chowdhury, F.S. & Altaf, N.M. (2021) ‘Findings from a Household Survey: Marginalised Communities in Bangladesh Dealing with the Fallout from the Pandemic’.

Sharma, A. & Adhikari, A.P. (2020) Covid-19 pandemic and Nepal: Issues and Perspectives.

Venter, Z.S., Aunan, K., Chowdhury, S. & Lelieveld, J. (2020) ‘COVID-19 lockdowns cause global air pollution declines’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 117, 18984–18990.

Face Masks & More: The environmental pollution of COVID-19

 

Failed COVID-19 mask trial shows why more masks are needed - Los Angeles Times

Hello! Welcome to week 11’s theme of the one and only Covid-19! The Covid-19 pandemic has certainly significantly changed the way that many of us have been living and it’s definitely changed our natural environment as well.

Firstly, in a bid to manage the spread of the virus, face masks have been mandated by various states to be worn by their citizens. Right here in Singapore, the state has been mandating the usage of face masks in public spaces since April 2020 (Ang and Phua, 2020). However, these masks are often made up of polypropylene and other forms of plastics or microplastics, adding these materials to the landfill when disposed by their users (Akber et al., 2020). Further studies done by Klemeš et al., (2020) suggests that a mask production consumes about 10-30 Wh energy and produces 59 g of carbon equivalent emissions into the atmosphere. As such, the huge increase in the usage and subsequent demand for face masks have placed a tremendous amount of pressure on the environment via carbon emissions and land waste.

While the collected mask wastes are often brought to the landfill and discarded (Selvaranjan et al., 2021), not all used face masks make it to the incineration plant. For improperly disposed face masks, they may end up in water bodies (Figure 1) where marine animals may get entangled, leading to their deaths . Furthermore, the fragmentation of the macro plastics in the mask could occur due to factors such as weathering, corrosion or aquatic immersion which forms the secondary micro plastics (Yang et al., 2020). When the marine animals ingest these secondary micro plastics, this could cause a bioaccumulation of dioxins within the marine ecosystem as the dioxins are passed through the food chain, causing even more harm to the marine animals and humans that consume these animals for food.

Fig. 12

Figure 1.

As such, just the simple mandate of wearing face masks during the pandemic has brought about a significant change in the environment, where carbon emissions from the production of face masks have increased significantly and a new source of microplastics pollution has emerged as well.

 

References

Akber Abbasi, S., Khalil, A.B. & Arslan, M. (2020) ‘Extensive use of face masks during COVID-19 pandemic: (micro-)plastic pollution and potential health concerns in the Arabian Peninsula’, Saudi Journal of Biological Sciences, 27, 3181–3186.

Ang, H.M. & Phua, R. (2020) ‘COVID-19: Compulsory to wear mask when leaving the house, says Lawrence Wong’, CNA. Available at: https://www.channelnewsasia.com/singapore/covid19-wearing-masks-compulsory-lawrence-wong-763956 (accessed March 2022).

Klemeš, J.J., Fan, Y.V. & Jiang, P. (2020) ‘The energy and environmental footprints of COVID-19 fighting measures – PPE, disinfection, supply chains’, Energy, 211, 118701.

Selvaranjan, K., Navaratnam, S., Rajeev, P. & Ravintherakumaran, N. (2021) ‘Environmental challenges induced by extensive use of face masks during COVID-19: A review and potential solutions’, Environmental Challenges, 3, 100039.

Yang, Y., Liu, W., Zhang, Z., Grossart, H.-P. & Gadd, G.M. (2020) ‘Microplastics provide new microbial niches in aquatic environments’, Applied Microbiology and Biotechnology, 104, 6501–6511.

Like, Comment, Subscribe: Social Media & Pollution

Krakow Is Policing Clean Air With Drones - Bloomberg

The previous post in this week’s theme of social media talked about how social media trends such as gender reveal parties have created significant pollution to the environment. However, social media fortunately does have its upsides as well. Looking past trends, the functionality of social media allows individuals and communities to connect with one another to pursue a common goal.

In Poland, lawmakers have banned the burning of coal to heat homes after environmental activists had come together to pressure them through a Facebook campaign, drawing over 20,000 followers (Gardiner, 2014).  The campaign made use of Facebook to share important information about the pollution occurring within the city of Krakow and the site was used to garner support through signatures for a petition to change the regulations regarding the smog. Additionally, software designers offered to create a mobile app that supports the residents in Krakow to track the air conditions within the city (Gardiner, 2014).

The example above highlights several things. Firstly, social media is an efficient tool in garnering support for environmental change. A study had found that after the coal ban, there was a 40% decrease in the sum of carcinogenic polycyclic acrylic hydrocarbons, benzo(a)pyrene, benzo(g,h,i)pyrene, indeno(1,2,3-cd)pyrene and pyrene (Majewska et al., 2021).

This illustrates how social media campaigns can bring realistic and effective changes to the environment, effecting top-down policies. Furthermore, with the application created to track air conditions, locals within the city are able to avoid travelling under harmful environmentally pollutive circumstances that may endanger their health. Thus, social media here can be seen as a means to bring effect to reduce environmental pollution and its negative impacts.

References

Gardiner, B. (2014) ‘Air of revolution: how activists and social media scrutinise city pollution’, The Guardian, 31 January.

Majewska, R., Perera, F.P., Sowa, A., Piotrowicz, K., Sochacka Tatara, E., Spengler, J., Camann, D. & Pac, A. (2021) ‘Decrease in airborne PAH concentrations in Krakow after intensified actions aiming to ban use of solid fuels for domestic heating’, ISEE Conference Abstracts, 2021, isee.2021.P-240.

 

Boy or Girl? The Pollutive Effects of Gender Reveal Parties

In this frame grab from a April 23, 2017, video provided by the US Forest Service, a gender reveal event ignited the 47,000-acre Sawmill Fire.

Have you ever seen a gender reveal party on social media? Scrolling through social media, I have come across a few dozen gender reveal party videos, showing extravagant ways in which parents find out the gender of their child. However, what most people don’t see from these videos are the detrimental effects that these performances have on the environment.

In April 2017, a US border patrol agent shot at a target full of blue coloured explosives with the intention of announcing the gender of his child. The explosion resulted in damage to 47,000 acres of the Arizona forest (Sullivan, 2020). 3 years later, in 2020, a Californian couple used a smoke bomb to reveal their baby’s gender, igniting a blaze that set off a wildfire that destroyed 7,000 acres of land and lasting a full 23 days (Canon, 2021).  The first obvious pollutive impacts of these wildfires are the carbon emissions released into the atmosphere. It has been found that wildfires inject large amounts of black carbon particles into the atmosphere, which can reach the lower stratosphere and cause strong radiative forcing of the climate (Ditas et al., 2018). The result in the loss of vegetation in these forests would also result in a loss of carbon sinks.

Additionally, the loss in vegetation would result in an increase in stormwater runoff, transporting nutrients from the soil such as nitrogen and phosphorous to accumulate in the streams (Morrison and Kolden, 2015). This effect has been found to last several years after the events of the wildfires. As the nutrients accumulate into the river streams, the pH of the aquatic ecosystem changes, adversely affecting the ecosystem within. For example, it has been found that nutrient loading into the California sea otter’s nearshore habitat has been documented to cause Sea Otter’s mortality (Miller et al., 2010). As such, this illustrates the pollutive effects of mismanaged gender reveal parties that set off unwanted wildfires in the environment.

While the birth of a child may be a beautiful thing to celebrate, we should certainly not celebrate at the expense of the environment. Once again, the excessive consumption of activities that place reckless harm to the environment is something that we can work together to halt.

 

References

Canon, G. (2021) ‘California couple whose gender-reveal party sparked a wildfire charged with 30 crimes’, The Guardian, 21 July.

Ditas, J., Ma, N., Zhang, Y., Assmann, D., Neumaier, M., Riede, H., Karu, E., Williams, J., Scharffe, D., Wang, Q., Saturno, J., Schwarz, J.P., Katich, J.M., McMeeking, G.R., Zahn, A., Hermann, M., Brenninkmeijer, C.A.M., Andreae, M.O., Pöschl, U., Su, H. & Cheng, Y. (2018) ‘Strong impact of wildfires on the abundance and aging of black carbon in the lowermost stratosphere’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 115.

Miller, M.A., Kudela, R.M., Mekebri, A., Crane, D., Oates, S.C., Tinker, M.T., Staedler, M., Miller, W.A., Toy-Choutka, S., Dominik, C., Hardin, D., Langlois, G., Murray, M., Ward, K. & Jessup, D.A. (2010) ‘Evidence for a Novel Marine Harmful Algal Bloom: Cyanotoxin (Microcystin) Transfer from Land to Sea Otters’, PLoS ONE, Edited by R. Thompson, 5, e12576.

Morrison, K.D. & Kolden, C.A. (2015) ‘Modeling the impacts of wildfire on runoff and pollutant transport from coastal watersheds to the nearshore environment’, Journal of Environmental Management, 151, 113–123.

Sullivan, H. (2020) ‘California blaze caused by firework at gender-reveal party’, The Guardian, 7 September.

Entertainment in Sports: Let’s Go Green!

In the previous 2 posts, we have observed how various sporting events such as the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics or Major League Baseball (MLB) have produced various forms of environmental pollution in their bid to stimulate economic growth through the sporting industry. In this post, we will be reviewing green initiatives taken by various sports leagues and evaluating their efficacy.

In the MLB, the San Francisco Giants are a baseball team based in San Francisco’s AT&T ballpark. The organisers of the ballpark have concentrated on energy and waste reduction by implementing a recycling and composting programme within the stadium, resulting in the diversion of 3.5 million pounds of ballpark waste in 2009, which is a rate of 75% of total waste (McCullough et al., 2015).  Given this, I believe that such a programme is effective as it does not inhibit the nature of the industry while reducing the amount of waste produced by the games. However, even though 75% of waste is recycled, the absolute amount of waste that goes to the landfill is still large, at a whopping estimated of about 1.17 million pounds. As such, though a step in the right direction, there are still limitations to the recycling and composting programme due to the sheer size of the industry.

In my previous post, I mentioned how the nature of the sports entertainment industry poses some challenges in reducing the amount of carbon emissions produced by the fans. On the flip side, research has found that the positive environmental practices of a professional sports team increases the consumer’s internalisation of their team values, where consumers become more likely to show their support for their team’s environmental initiatives (Blankenbuehler and Kunz, 2014). For example, the Brooklyn Nets launched a “B” Green programme where they provided bicycle racks at the park to encourage fans to cycle to the arena while also encouraging them to practice recycling (Blankenbuehler and Kunz, 2014).

On a larger scale, the National Basketball Association (NBA) has worked together with the National Resource Defence Council (NRDC) to come up with initiatives to green the sports industry. Together, they improved the existing recycling programme in the arena to include plastic bottles and aluminium cans, while also procuring 100% of recycled content bathroom tissue in the arena (NRDC, n.d.). Furthermore, the NRDC provided hybrid cars for staff transportation as well, which reduces the amount of carbon emission produced during travelling.

As such, the complexity of the nature of the sports industry goes both ways, where the integral nature of the fans has become a double-edged sword in reducing environmental pollution. On the one hand, their essentiality in the industry reduces the possibility of a lower physical turnout to reduce carbon emissions by travelling. On the other hand, these fans are more susceptible to the influence of their sports teams and the environmental practices promoted. As such, with proper initiatives and guidance, I do believe that the attachment to these teams can be made use of to create a greener sports entertainment industry.

References

Blankenbuehler, M. & Kunz, M.B. (2014) ‘Professional Sports Compete to Go Green’, American Journal of Management, 14, 75–81.

McCullough, B.P., Pfahl, M.E. & Nguyen, S.N. (2016) ‘The green waves of environmental sustainability in sport’, Sport in Society, 19, 1040–1065.

National Resource Defence Council (n.d.) ‘NRDC: Game Changer – NBA All-Star Game Case Study’.

Entertainment in Sports: Transport

The global sports industry is a thriving industry, spanning various popular sports leagues such as the National Football League (NFL), Major League Baseball (MLB), and the National Basketball Association (NBA). For example, the NBA itself was projected to earn a whopping $10 Billion in revenue during the 2021-2022 season (Young, 2021), which evidently illustrates the intensity and lucrativeness of these sports leagues. However, because of such an intensity, the intensity in consumption behaviour during these sporting events rises as well, leading to rising concerns of environmental pollution.

For these popular sports leagues, many teams have their own stadium in their respective cities. As such, during the league itself, each team would have to frequently travel out to their opponent’s home stadium to compete. For example, it was found that each MLB sports team had to travel 40 times to another stadium to compete during the league (Triantafyllidis, 2018). Furthermore, it was also found that many of these sports league fans travel along with these sports teams to support them during their away games (Triantafyllidis, 2018). It was also found that these fans often traveled in their personal vehicles, adding to the increase in carbon emissions per capita (Locke, 2018). While the distance traveled varies according to where the away games are, it is clear that since the MLB is a nationwide sporting event, spectators who follow their sports teams have to travel long distances across the US states. As such, the carbon emissions emitted while traveling to and fro to the stadium by the sports team and their fans would definitely accumulate over time, resulting in a large amount of carbon emissions deriving solely from these sporting events.

Locke (2018) further substantiates this claim as he found that there was a statistically significant relationship between the increase in the Air Quality Index (AQI) values of the city when there was an MLB game being hosted. As such, this illustrates the pollutive effects of the consumption of major sporting events by spectators.

In my opinion, while technology has advanced and live-streaming sports events has gained a foothold in the industry, nothing can replace the authentic sporting environment of physically supporting your team in large stadiums with the camaraderie of your fellow supporters. The reduction of the attendance by fans would also weaken the appeal of sporting events. Additionally, there would be a redundancy in the large stadiums built, resulting in the degradation of these buildings, leading to more environmental pollution. As such, the challenges associated with live sports entertainment are more complex as it has to take into consideration the nature of the industry where fans are equally as important as the players themselves.

References

Locke, S.L. (2019) ‘Estimating the Impact of Major League Baseball Games on Local Air Pollution’, Contemporary Economic Policy, 37, 236–244.

Triantafyllidis, S. (2018) ‘Carbon Dioxide Emissions Research and Sustainable Transportation in the Sports Industry’, C, 4, 57.

Young, J. (2021) ‘NBA projects $10 billion in revenue as audiences return after Covid, but TV viewership is a big question’, CNBC. Available at: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/18/nba-2021-2022-season-10-billion-revenue-tv-viewership-rebound.html (accessed March 2022).