his month, millions of fans across the country began their annual pilgrimage to the local sports arena for the start of the 1993 baseball

season. While the “national pastime” and its cousins-professional football, basketball, and hockey-may still mean fun and relaxation for sports enthusi- asts, they have also spawned a serious, multibillion-dollar food business. Fast food is made readily available for sports fans, few of whom are thinking about waste management. As the fans leave, stadium and vendor officials are left with mountains of throw-away food packaging.

Gone are the days of just peanuts and Crackerjacks. Today’s sports com- plexes offer a wide variety of food, from the basic beer and hot dog to pizza, spe- cialty sandwiches, seafood, or wine. In some of the larger stadiums that con- tain luxurious, air-conditioned skyboxes, gourmet meals can be ordered on fine china and silverware.

In some cases, independent bars and restaurants set up their own shops inside stadiums. Most of these businesses and stadium vendors dispose of and recycle

their own wastes, but their use of dif- ferent packaging materials further com- plicates the stadium’s overall waste stream. While the vast majority of sta- dium waste is cardboard and plastic, other materials like glass and aluminum- mostly from stadium vendors-can now be found in small quantities.

As more stadiums are adding non- sports-related features-such as parks and shopping malls-to attract a wider audi- ence, more emphasis is being placed on handling the more sophisticated waste stream. Some modern sports complexes now resemble mini-cities, and the waste collection systems at these facilities are beginning to borrow from their urban counterparts.

The starting line-up Though the venues and playing con-

ditions vary from sport to sport, the waste from the fans seldom varies. No matter what the sport, convenience is the chief concern with food vendors. Therefore, besides food wastes, card- board trays and cartons, polystyrene (PS) cups, and paper napkins are by far the most prevalent materials, by volume,

A P R I L 1 9 9 3 WASTE AGE 87

Sfudiums Contd.

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SUPER BOWL XXVlI Combined Totals

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. 88 WASTE AGE A P R I L 1 9 9 3

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city of Pasadena for its regular waste collection. Between UCLA’s home football games, the annual

college Rose Bowl game, and the occasional Super Bowl, the stadium holds about 12-15 major events each year, producing an average of 17 tons of waste per month, says Barbara Cathey, solid waste planning and operations administrator for the city of Pasadena. Besides football games, the facility holds a monthly “swap meet,” or flea market, on the field, producing about five tons of waste per month, and maintains a park surrounding the sta- dium. Several times a week, the city crews collect from the stadium and the park, and bring the refuse to the Scholl Canyon landfill in Glendale, Calif., owned by the Los Angeles County Sanitation Districts.

Like the Rose Bowl, the Meadowlands Complex has several different sports attractions, but it holds them on an almost weekly basis. The complex includes: 78,000- seat Giants Stadium, shared by the New York Giants and New York Jets football teams; 18,000-19,000-seat Brendan Byrne Arena, where the New Jersey Nets and Devils play basketball and hockey; and 35,000-seat Mead- owlands Racetrack.

Recently, the complex switched from using small, local haulers to collect from the grounds, to contracting with Waste Management, Inc. (WMI, Oak Brook, Ill.). Even during the summer months, when football, bas- ketball, and hockey are in the off-season, activity from the “backstretch” of the racetrack requires almost daily WMI pick-ups from twelve 4yard containers, Sullivan says. The backstretch consists of seven dormitories for 800-900 people, and barns and stables to hold 2,000 horses. “It’s like a little city back there,” he adds.

Giants Stadium wastes are the most sporadic, he says, and are collected weekly, after each football game. Dur- ing basketball and hockey season, WMI is required to col-

lect two to three times from Byrne Arena and the race- track grandstand. Wastes from the stadium and arena are collected by stadium crews using one-yard carts and deposited in eight 30-yard containers by the facility’s pump station. WMI then sends all waste to the Bergen County Utility Authority for disposal.

On average, the three facilities produce about 4,800 tons of waste per year, Sullivan says; nearly half coming from the racetrack grandstand and backstretch. “That’s just what we can count,” he says. “There are a lot of scav- engers out there who pick up stuff from the parking lots. We don’t allow it, but we don’t kick them off, either.”

Down the tubes Although the Meadowlands Complex was considered

ahead of itstime when it was completed in 1976, it was built before today’s heightened emphasis on solid waste planning. Newer stadiums, such as SkyDome and Chica- go’s Comiskey Park, home of the city’s White Sox base- ball club, had waste management in mind from square one.

In both stadiums, each deck is connected to a refuse chute that leads to a compactor area in the lower levels. Once the material is collected from the stands and refuse bins, it is sent down the chute to a compactor or container below.

Comiskey Park, which opened in April 1991, aver- aged more than 33,000 fans and about 52 cubic yards of waste per game, says Dan Polvere, assistant director for park operations. The waste, mostly food-contaminated paper products, was compacted in the stadium’s three SP Industries (Hopkins, Mich.) compactors under the chute. Waste was then placed in Galbreath (Winamac, Ind.) containers and was emptied every other game by WMI subsidiary Waste Management Metro (Chicago). During the off-season, October to April, only office waste is collected from Comiskey, he says.

At SkyDome, however, 245 event-days and 5 mil- lion spectators a year mean there is no true “off-season,” Parnham says, but there are peaks and valleys in the waste stream. During the 1992 baseball season, when the 83 Blue Jay games averaged 50,000 fans each, waste levels were highest; last July, the stadium generated 193.34 metric tonnes (212.67 tons) of solid waste. During the fall and winter months, when the stadium hosts the 10 Arg- onaut games and various auto races, ice shows, circuses, and basketball, waste totals decline; October produced only 135.17 metric tonnes (148.69 tons).

The waste is dumped in the chute, which can be accessed from all five stadium levels, then compacted in

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a central area by the facility’s Universal Handling Equip ment (Hamilton, Ontario) compactor, and stored in 75- yard Heil Co. (Chattanooga, Tenn.) trailers, Parnham says. Local hauler Young Disposal, Inc. (Toronto), collects about nine trailers per month, or every 2.5 games, dur- ing baseball season, and seven per month during times of lower demand, she says.

Let’s see that again Despite these large volumes of fairly homogeneous

waste being generated at stadiums, recycling programs are mostly creatures of the ’90s and still in developmen- tal stages.

One of the pioneers of stadium recycling is the Meadowlands. Due to its sheer size, the complex was looking after its best interests when it began its recy- cling program in 1988, Sullivan says. “We looked at recy- cling in the early %Os, but it didn’t look like it was worth it,” he says. “Now we’re seeing dump fees of about $139 a ton in New Jersey. We figure, for whatever thing we recy- cle, we pay less for disposal. We’re moving away from plas- tics, but anything we can get our hands on, we collect.”

The diverse events that occur at the complex ensure a constant stream of sundry recyclables. In 1991, the most recent year figures have been tabulated, the Mead- owlands recycled 163 tons of cardboard, and 77.5 tons of glass and aluminum, Sullivan says. Through daily office routine and maintenance of the grounds, the complex diverted 15 tons of newspaper, 34.5 tons of office paper, 66 tons of wood, 5,800 gallons of oil, and 2,600 tons of parking lot asphalt-even 697 tons of manure from the racetrack was composted at a mushroom farm in Con- necticut, he says.

Sometimes the recycling numbers can change depending on who’s on the playing field, Sullivan says. “When the Jets are playing, we sometimes get lower numbers for glass and cans,” he says. “New York has a con- tainer deposit law but New Jersey doesn’t. Generally, more New Yorkers tend to follow the Jets than they do the Giants, who are bigger in New Jersey. So when the tail- gaters from New York come over with their returnable bot- tles to watch the Jets, the scavengers pick more of [the con- tainers] up than we can.”

In the future, the Meadowlands Complex is toying with the idea of recycling PS with its glass and metals, and composting some of the food scraps that wind up in refuse containers, Sullivan says. Complex officials are talk- ing with American Soil, Inc. (Parlin, N.J.), about a possible system to turn the scraps into mulch.

Turning a double play Officials at both SkyDome and Comiskey Park are fol-

lowing Meadowlands’ lead with their own programs to divert the large amounts of cardboard, paper, and PS waste generated at their locales. The two stadiums began their programs on “Opening Day” in April 1992.

SkyDome scattered 130 blue recycling bins made by Rubbermaid Commercial Products, Inc. (Winchester, Va.), for collection of PS around the stadium, and placed posters and flyers near food vendors urging customers to toss in their discarded beer cups. “After a few weeks, we had to relocate the bins closer to the garbage cans,” Parnham says. “People were confusing the bins with the garbage cans and tossing in their garbage.”

After the bins fill up, stadium crews cart the PS to the central sorting area on the ground floor where it is light- ly compressea in a separate compactor leased from Brown- ing-Ferris Industries (BFI, Houston). BFI takes a 4@yat-d load once a month to the Canadian Polystyrene Recycling A s s o ciation (CPRA) in the neighboring city of Mississauga, Ontario, she says.

At CPRA’s 80,000-square-foot facility, the PS is sorted, washed, dried, pelletized, and marketed for new products like office supplies, food trays, VCR cassettes, compact disc packaging, and several other uses, says Diane LeClaire, CPRA’s procurement manager. CPRA also takes PS from 250 other commercial sources, including Maple Leaf Gar- dens, home of Toronto’s professional hockey team. “We see very little contamination in the plastic,” she says. The only problem, according to Parnham and LeClaire, is the cups that are left behind in the stands that have to be picked up by clean-up crews. “Eventually, everything makes its way to the floor, and a lot of cups get lost behind the seats,” LeClaire says. Out of an estimated 3 million beer cups sold at SkyDome in 1992, more than 570,000 cups, or 6.1 tons of PS, were recovered. Another 262.3 tons of cardboard, which is banned in Ontario landfills, were also separated and placed in its own container for recycling. The rest of the refuse consisted of foodcontaminated paper, which was sent to a landfill, and small amounts of glass.

A similar collection program exists at Comiskey, where 160,000 PS beer cups, or 1.7 tons of PS, were diverted from the waste stream, says Maria Grosser, environmental advi- sor for Dow Chemical Co. (Midland, Mich.), which helped coordinate the pilot project.

For 1993, the stadium is changing from using all wax- paper cups to PS, says Comiskey’s Polvere. “We decided to stick with all one easily recycled material to make it eas- ier,” he says. “Using the paper with wax is what kills you

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Stadiums Contd.

in recycling.” Comiskey uses 100 or so black, 20%-post-consumer

plastic, Rubbermaid collection bins, which are placed near the refuse containers. The bin lids, emblazoned with a sign reading “plastic and foam cups only,” have two 4-inch-diameter holes, just large enough for an empty beer cup to pass through.

When the clear plastic bags inside the bins fill up, they are taken out and tossed down the chute with the other black plastic bags containing regular refuse. All clear bags are then removed at the sorting room and taken by Ace Hauliig’s recycling subsidiary, Ace Recycling, to the Nation- al Polystyrene Recycling Co. (NPRC) plant in Chicago.

Since the project is only a year old, NPRC has not yet collected enough PS to economically recycle the plastic into consumer goods, Grosser says. “But for one of the White Sox giveaways this season, we’ll be handing out about 20,000 or so pens made from the cups,” she says. “We’ll be giving back to the fans what they gave us.”

After review, the play stands One of the more noteworthy recyding projects this year

came from the mammoth A-Trojan clean-up from the Super Bowl XXVII festivities. Of the more than 74 tons of waste generated over five days, 35.5 tons of cardboard, alu- minum, glass, mixed paper, and asphalt-48% of the total waste stream-was recycled, according to A-Trojan’s Aga- malian. With the surprising amount of cardboard found in the waste stream, he suggested placing more cardboard- only roll-offs on site to handle the extra load.

“This was the first time we collected recyclables from a stadium, and I’m surprised at how easy it was,” he says. “We’re very happy we got as much as we did.”

A-Trojan placed about 400 blue Rubbermaid recy- cling bins (the same type used at Comiskey and SkyDome) next to the general refuse containers around the three events, Agamalian says. Both the 3-yard bins and the roll- off containers were marked “trash only” or “recyclables only.” Clear bags lined the recyclables containers while brown bags held refuse. Once the containers and bins were filled, both brown and clear bags were sent in sepa- rate A-Trojan White/GMC (Greensboro, N.C.) roll-off trucks to the Central Transfer Station in Los Angeles, he says.

Despite the project’s success, the Super Bowl was not all fun and games, Agamalian says. He estimates that, like the Meadowlands, the project lost around 50% of its poten- tial recycling volume to scavengers and misused contain- ers. “The events had about 200 vendors, and by the time the events began, some were not set up yet,” he says.

“Some vendors were taking both recycling and refuse con- tainers and arbitrarily using them for trash,” he says. “That was one of our biggest problems.”

One solution to the problem would be to join the refuse and recycling containers together, Agamalian says. “That way, if communications break down and they pull away one container, they pull away both.”

Intentional grounding As Agamalian can attest, stadium recycling can work,

but not for everyone. When Oriole Park at Camden Yards was opened for the Baltimore Orioles’ 1992 baseball sea- son, park planners envisioned a state-of-the-art recycling program, complete with a trash chute to a Marathon Equipment (Vernon, Ala.) compactor a la SkyDome and Comiskey. But, after the Maryland Stadium Authority (MSA) looked over the costs of a recycling plan, the pro- gram was dropped, says Sherman Kerbel, director of facil- ity management for MSA.

“Since we’re constantly hearing that there’s more col- lected cardboard and newspaper than the industry can absorb, we saw no economic viability in recycling our waste,” Kerbel says. “The bulk of our waste is primarily food wrappers with food that has spoiled. The Health Depart- ment says we can’t recycle that paper.

“We’re not recycling now,” he adds, “but we’ll be actively pursuing greater separation of glass and cans from the skyboxes and vendors through the course of the season. Currently, they still get mixed in with the trash.”

In the meantime, recycling duties required by law are performed by the Baltimore Refuse Energy Systems Co. (BRESCO), which sorts all of the stadium’s refuse. Recy- clables are pulled out on the front end of the BJZESCO system and the rest is sent to the company’s 2,250-tpd wastetoenergy incinerator, Kerbel says. “It’s just as easy and costeffective to let [BRESCO] sort it as it is for us,” he says. “Besides, waste is their business, not ours.”

In the stadium’s first year, about 18-25 tons of waste was generated per game from an average of 46,000 fans per game, the fifth highest attendance mark in baseball his- tory, Kerbel says. The waste, placed in 30-yard containers, is picked up from Camden Yards about every 1.5 games by local Baltimore hauler, Debris, Inc., and sent to BRESCO, he says.

“For most waste operations, they open up at 20% or so, then they go up to 40% capacity, and so on,” Kerbel says. “With us, we open up and it’s all right there at once. The politically correct thing is to say recycling is the be-all and end-all, but the truth is, we’re just not there yet.” I

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