Over GreenSportsBlog’s 3 1/2 year existence, we’ve spoken with many leading lights from across the Green-Sports spectrum. But the Green-Sports niche, while growing, is still relatively small. When will Green-Sports reach critical mass? What are the key challenges the sports green movement has to overcome? To get some answers, GreenSportsBlog is going outside of the Green-Sports world to take a look inward. We are talking, in an occasional series, with leaders from various corners of the sustainability, business and non-profit worlds to get their views on the sports-greening movement. So far, we’ve spoken with Joel Makower, chairman and executive editor of GreenBiz Group; Jerry Taylor, a leading libertarian DC lobbyist who was climate denier/skeptic, “switched teams” and is now a climate change fighting advocate; Dr. Michael Mann, one of the world’s foremost climate scientists, and Caryl Stern, President and CEO of the US Fund for UNICEF.

For our fifth installment, we bring you Paul Polizzotto, President and Founder of CBS EcoMedia, a fast-growing division of CBS that directs a portion of advertisers’ spending on its various media outlets (TV, radio, and digital) to non-profits tackling environmental and other societal issues. 

 
GreenSportsBlog: Paul, congratulations on your success at CBS EcoMedia. You and your team have created a powerful business model: Using a portion of a company’s advertising spending in the service of solving environmental and other issues. We will get to the nuts and bolts of how EcoMedia works but first, take us through how you got involved with sustainability and sustainable business?
Paul Polizzotto: Coincidentally, at least for your audience, my interest in sustainability came as a result of my love of sports; surfing to be exact. I grew up surfing in Manhattan Beach, CA and Santa Monica Bay. Back then it was a very polluted bay. I—along with other surfers—got sick all the time: sinus infections, ear infections, skin infections. I thought: we need to clean the water to make it safe for surfers, other people and wildlife. So I started digging to find out what the sources of the pollution in the bay were and found the contract cleaning industry…
GSB: …What is the contract cleaning industry, exactly?
PP: We’re talking about companies that clean parking lots, industrial sites, manufacturing facilities, and bio-infectious and other areas, where oil, chemicals and other pollutants are sucked up during the course of the cleaning process. Many of these contractors were operating illegally, dumping the untreated wastewater in the drains that fed into the Santa Monica Bay, and contributing to the water pollution. This was a violation of the federal Clean Water Act. So, in response, back in 1989, I started my first company, Property Prep. I came up with processes to capture, pretreat and discharge wastewater in a compliant way, removing the pollutants before they flowed into the Bay. I coined the term “Urban Watershed Cleaning” to describe this “zero discharge” approach.
 

Paul Polizzotto, President and Founder of CBS EcoMedia. (Photo credit: Eric Smith, CBS EcoMedia)

 
GSB: Holy cow; what a great response! Are you a chemist or an engineer by trade?
PP: No, but I do have a bit of an engineering mind. And we became successful pretty quickly, growing to 150 employees and legalizing the contract cleaning industry in the process. In fact, Property Prep, which we sold a long time ago, exists today and is still successful.
GSB: That’s an impressive legacy, indeed. What did you do next?
PP: We looked to grow and build our impact by expanding beyond Southern California. We keyed in on the new stormwater regulations that were put into place in the late 90s. This was in response to the fact that, per the Clean Water Act, the nation’s waterways needed to be cleaned by 1983, but, by the late 90s, were still impaired in many areas. Cities were particularly hard-hit by the need to clean up the waterways, but their budgets were strapped. So we started a non-profit called Adopt-a-Waterway. Starting in the late 1990s, we worked with cities like Baltimore and Miami through a public-private partnership. Adopt-a-Waterway obtained the rights to post signs promoting the cleanup of local waterways on roadways near storm drains…
GSB: …A la the already existing Adopt-a-Highway model?
PP: Yes. And the lion’s share of the revenue we raised went back to the cities to assist them in funding the mandated waterway cleanups.
GSB: The mayors must have LOVED you!
PP: We got along quite well, yes, and I was very proud of the program’s success. Through our work with the mayors, I saw first-hand how cities were really struggling to fund their Municipal Climate Action Plans—federally-mandated programs that called for CO2 reductions of 20 percent by 2020 and 50 percent by 2050. I became increasingly interested, not just in water pollution, but in the larger issue of climate change—and it became clear to me that to make a meaningful difference, we would have to reach a bigger audience, through a much bigger media presence. And that meant TV, radio, outdoor, and digital.
GSB: So how did you go about doing that?
PP: Well, first we needed to become a for-profit.
GSB: Why?
PP: As a non-profit, we were competing with many other worthy nonprofits for a slice of the too-small funding pie. It became my goal to bring new money to the table. What if we could create an ad model that would fund non-profits rather than being one of many non-profits soliciting corporate dollars? We would be creating additional revenue—a funding stream that nonprofits would never have had access to otherwise, from businesses and industries who’d never contributed to nonprofits before. So EcoMedia was born.
GSB: How did that work?
PP: It was a public-private partnership model similar to Adopt-a-Waterway, just on a bigger scale. We got the rights from select cities to green public buildings and sell sponsorships to those greening projects. Then we partnered with media companies, including CBS, to divert a portion of an interested advertiser’s media budget to support the greening projects. Our Green Schools Initiative—a project that won the 2009 US Conference of Mayors Award for Excellence in Public Private Partnerships —used participating dollars from advertisers on CBS TV affiliates in Chicago, Miami and San Francisco to install solar panels on school roofs, accomplish energy efficient retrofits, and create STEM curricula and other educational programs in those cities.

Paul Polizzotto (#7) congratulates members of the St. Anthony’s HS (Jersey City, NJ) basketball team after an exhibition game against a team of EcoMedia, UnitedHealthcare, and Cal Ripken, Sr. Foundation representatives as part of the Team 8 program. (Photo credit: Eric Smith, CBS EcoMedia)

 
GSB: So COOL! What’s next for EcoMedia?
PP: In addition to connecting advertisers with causes, we also want to connect directly with the segment of the public that is cause-driven. We’re doing this with our latest initiative, Viewers to Volunteers. With V2V, users can, via their computer, tablet or phone, direct sponsor ad dollars to environmental, education, wellness and veterans’ non-profits. Since 2015, with the support of Toyota, Chevy, and Winthrop Hospital, over $1.3 million has been donated to nonprofits—simply as a result of our V2V users reading, viewing, and sharing positive content.
GSB: This is, of course, terrific, Paul. Really great. It seems as though, through CBS EcoMedia, you’ve been able to fuse Green—and other causes—with sports—along with other CBS media platforms. My question is, why is Green-Sports still a relatively small, unknown niche? And what do you think its larger potential is?
PP: Lew, climate change is the most serious issue of our time. Any way we can raise awareness and interest is crucial, and the best way to do that is to connect with folks around their passions. And sports IS passion. We have to expose fans to environmental innovations and initiatives where they go to enjoy, and participate in, sports—at stadiums, arenas, and during athletic competitions and events on TV and smaller screens. Where there is passion, there is the opportunity to solve big problems. So the number of corporations using sports to promote green initiatives will only grow, I know it.
GSB: Couldn’t have said it better myself!