Yale Gives Greening Athletics the Old College Try

Yale Bowl Football Game Photo
Image via: Any Given Saturday

Amongst an audience of their peers at the National Collegiate Athletic Association, representatives from Yale University recently outlined how they plan to bring green to the university athletic department. How exactly does one go about making running, jumping, swimming and other various athletic activities more environmentally sound? Find out next.

Thanks to an anonymous donation in 2008 to bring together the Office of Sustainability and the Athletics Department, the program got a major jump start. The plan is still early in development, but Sarah Smiley Smith, Project Manager at the Yale Office of Sustainability, outlined the following goals for greening the athletic department. They include:

- Developing a strategic sustainability plan for athletics that will offer short- and long-term suggestions for improvements that can be made in operations and practices throughout the program.
- Establishing a set of green standards for Yale athletic events that in part reflect best practices researched at other institutions.

- Implementing collaborative efforts with student athletes, including creating sustainability partnerships with each varsity team in the coming term.

- Using the lessons learned through the development of the strategic plan for Yale athletics to create a model that is measurable, transferable and adaptable.

- Creating a database of best practices collected from a variety of sources so that institutions interested in improving the sustainability of their athletic departments will have an accessible source of the best knowledge and experience.

:Yale Office of Sustainability

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