SCOTTSDALE, AZ — The "boys of summer" are back and going green to help out Mother Earth and they are hitting it out of the park.
“I think that every stadium is looking at the impact they are making and trying to triage and find ways to reduce that impact,” said Kyle Urban, Operations and Events Manager at Scottsdale Stadium.
The Cactus League has 10 stadiums, 15 teams, and millions of fans. It creates a pretty big carbon footprint but they are working to change that. In the East Valley at Scottsdale Stadium, it’s all about recycling.
“We do recycle here pretty heavily with all of the cans created after a spring training game, all the bottles, that sort of thing. We also have a trash and a recycle compactor on site, using a compactor breaking everything down. [By] making it smaller, you have less loads of trash, less gas used, less trips to the landfill,” said Urban.
Food composting is also new this year.
“We are targeting the last three weeks of spring training to get an idea of what a compost program might look like on a small scale so we can look at options to make it a much larger scale in the future,” said Urban.
On the west side of town at Camelback Ranch they’ve gone solar in the parking lot, but the centerpiece is the five-acre lake.
“It comes to us from the City of Glendale but this is not drinking water. We irrigate our fields, we irrigate our landscape with 100% reclaimed water,” said Matt Slatus, General Manager at Camelback Ranch.
They are also using more drought-tolerant turf surfacing to reduce their water usage.
“I think it’s all about these baby steps that we can take as a league. As the Dodgers and the White Sox and the rest of the Cactus League, if we are all supporting sustainability, we are doing our job,” said Slatus.
“It’s really important we are a focal point when people come to spring training and we get to set a good example for the community so that folks can take some of what we do here back to their own homes,” said Urban.
For more news and events surrounding spring training, click here.
