It’s Time for Some Serious Trash Talk.

With that slogan splashed across the facemask of an imposing Philadelphia Eagle football player, you enter the Eagles’ Go Green website, exhibit A in my challenge to my good friend Mardi Ditze. She wrote two weeks ago about sports’ detrimental environmental impact that sporting events create, but sports and teams can actually help lead important changes on a wide range of sustainability issues, and my beloved Eagles may be the poster child for “tackling” these issues. So, with baseball season now upon us, let’s turn our attention to football.

I’ll grant her that there are certainly issues I would want to address; I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a parking lot like the one in South Philadelphia that surrounds the four homes of the city’s professional sports franchises, though it probably compares to Disney’s fields of asphalt.

The Eagles commitment starts at the top with the involvement of owners Jeff and Christina Lurie. With help from our partner PECO, the Eagles will reimburse any Eagles employee who signs up for PECO WIND. The impressive list of their other green accomplishments spans waste disposal, energy efficiency, renewable energy, purchasing decisions, and has incorporated marketing and announcements that involve the players themselves.  Since initiating the program in 2003, the team has replaced over one million plastic cups annually with cups made from a corn-based material, which supposedly biodegrade in as little as 50 days, reduced the electricity consumption at Lincoln Financial Field by 33%, and recycled 19% of all the team’s waste. Even the 2008 Eagles cheerleader calendar, printed on post-consumer recycled paper, featured “eco-bikinis”, made from recycled plastic bottles or organic cotton.

This is an effort, and a team, I can root for, and do, loudly.

 * Pictured above: Frank Jiruska, PECO; C. Lurie, Owner of Philadelphia Eagles;  Paul Copleman, Community Energy, Inc.