The amount of waste created during an event at US Bank Stadium is pretty big but it has to be massive but organizers have been working since last summer to keep all garbage out of the landfill. How?
To get the initiative, called Rush2Recycle, up and operating on game day, the sponsoring companies hired around 200 local students who, along with a team of volunteers from PepsiCo, will serve as project ambassadors at the stadium; they’ll be stationed around bins, informing visitors as to what can be composted, recycled, or thrown in the trash.
Making sure those extra bins will actually be filled required other tweaks throughout the stadium. Aramark, in advance of the game, converted over 70 different products–from draft beer cups, to nacho trays, to portion cups for cheese sauce–to compostable materials. (This will be, for instance, the first Super Bowl to feature peanuts sold in compostable bags.)
While certainly an improvement over landfill-inundating Super Bowls of the past, this year’s initiative is still not emissions-free: Waste-to-energy incinerators can be an iffy solve for non-recyclable plastics, because the carbon emissions from their operations still damage the climate (still, though, it’s an improvement over landfill).