Sports events leave a giant 'ecological footprint'

New Scientist Breaking News - Sports events leave a giant 'ecological footprint': "Large sporting events have an 'ecological footprint' thousands of times the size of the pitches they are played on. That's according to researchers who have calculated a sporting event's environmental impact for the first time.

Andrea Collins of Cardiff University in the UK and her colleagues looked at the 2004 soccer FA Cup final, held at Cardiff's Millennium Stadium. They converted the energy and resources used on the day of the match into an ecological footprint - the hypothetical area of land required to support the use of those resources. Energy consumed, for example, was converted into the area of forest needed to soak up the carbon dioxide generated in its production, while food consumption was represented as the amount of farmland needed to make it. This method gave the match a footprint of 3051 hectares.

More than half the footprint came from transport. The 73,000 supporters collectively travelled nearly 42 million kilometres to reach the match. Fewer than half travelled by car, but car use generated 68 per cent of the transport footprint. If those fans had travelled by bus instead the footprint would have been 399 hectares smaller.

Food was the second-largest contributor, weighing in at 1381 hectares for the 36,500 snacks consumed. The researchers say this could easily be reduced: for example, substituting all the beef with chicken would have taken 428 hectares off the footprint.

The impact of waste disposal, at 146 hectares, was surprisingly low, says Collins. Recycling would have trimmed this by 39 hectares. [...]"