Before the long Memorial Day weekend, GSB News & Notes hopscotches the globe, from New Jersey to Scotland to Japan: A family-owned, 100-year old moving company in New Jersey has found a novel way to join the Green-Sports movement: It started Move for Hunger, a non-profit that rescues unused food from road races. Gala Rugby Club in Scotland is using on-site solar to green its 105-year old stadium. And concerns are being raised about the use of timber from depleted tropical rainforests in construction of venues for the 2020 Summer Olympic and Paralympic Games in Tokyo. 

 
MOVE FOR HUNGER: USING MOVING VANS TO SAVE UNUSED FOOD FROM ROAD RACES
Growing up in the Jersey Shore town of Neptune, Adam Lowy had to have thought his career would somehow involve working with moving vans. After all, he and his brother Max represent the fourth generation of family-run Lowy’s Moving Service.
And moving vans have, indeed, become central to Lowy’s professional life; just not in the way he likely would have imagined.
While Max is now the Vice President of Office & Industrial Sales at Lowy’s Moving Service, Adam is the Executive Director and Founder of Move For Hunger (MFH), a nonprofit that works with all manner of moving companies to collect non-perishable food items, and deliver it to food banks all across North America.
 

Adam Lowy, Executive Director/Founder, Move For Hunger (Photo credit: Move For Hunger)

 
The germ of the idea that became MFH came from Adam’s experience in the moving business.
“People throw out lots of unused food, especially when they move.” said Lowy, “And they are happy to give away unused food—if it’s hassle-free. On the flip side, lots of people are hungry—far too many, in fact. This was crazy to me: In Monmouth County, our home area in New Jersey, 56,000 in fact. So Move For Hunger was created to bridge this gap.”
Since MFH’s launch in 2009, the growing nonprofit has, through its partnerships with 750 movers in the US and Canada, delivered 8 million pounds of unused food to food banks. The unused food is picked up from homes, businesses, apartment communities and at colleges and universities. And now, from road races.
Initially, Lowy’s rationale for using marathons and half marathons was not for unused food pickup. Rather, road races started out as a creative fundraising vehicle for MFH.
“Playing on the word ‘move‘ in Move for Hunger, we started to get people to run for us—getting their friends and family to pledge $X per mile—in the New Jersey Marathon,” recalled Lowy. “We raised a couple of thousand dollars when we started with five runners in 2013. By 2016 ‘Team Move’ runners numbered 200, ran 2,500 combined miles and raised $75,000. As we were doing this, we noticed that so much food was wasted at all types of road races, from 5Ks up to marathons to cycling events.”
MFH started working with races across the country in 2014 to collect their unused food and redirect it to food banks. Since then, they’ve rescued over 460,000 lbs. of food from high profile events, including the LA Marathon, Seattle Half Marathon, Miami Marathon, and the New York Triathlon.
 

NorthStar Moving helps pickup unused food from the LA Marathon as part of its pro bono work for Move For Hunger (Photo credit: NorthStar Moving)

 
Sports will continue to play an important role at Move For Hunger, says Lowy. “Sports fills a lot of boxes for us: It’s an efficient way for us to rescue food, and it’s a cool way to build awareness around our ‘NO FOOD TO WASTE’ branding.”
 
GALA RUGBY CLUB IN SCOTLAND INSTALLS SOLAR, SAVES MONEY
Gala Rugby Club (GRC), in Galashiels, is one of ten amateur# clubs in the BT Premiership, the top tier of rugby union in Scotland. As rugby union’s popularity in Scotland is relatively small compared to that of soccer, the club’s owners are especially keen to cut operational costs. With that in mind, GRC hired Resource Efficient Scotland (RES) to find ways to reduce water and energy bills at quaint, 105-year old Netherdale Stadium.
 

Netherdale Stadium, the 5,000 seat home of Gala Rugby Club in Galashiels, Scotland. (Photo credit: Resource Efficient Scotland)

 
RES’ initial on-site assessment revealed energy reduction and water consumption measures that could lead to about $27,000 in savings, a significant sum for a club of Gala’s size.
That same analysis looked at outfitting Netherdale Stadium with solar photovoltaic (PV) cells, but the site was not in use significantly over the summer period (the BT Premiership season runs from late August through April), so the idea was shelved. But, in 2015, the Scottish Rugby Union asked to use Netherdale and other facilities at GRC for a variety of activities during the summer. This turned the financial case for solar from negative to positive. GRC subsequently applied for and received a RES small and medium size establishment (SME) loan to help it purchase and install the solar panels.
According to RES, it is projected that the solar installation will provide Gala Rugby Club with around 70% of its electricity needs, reducing its annual energy costs by nearly $8,000 and CO2 emissions by around 11 tonnes.
The financial relief may sound small, but the truth is the reductions in operating costs from the efficiency measures and the introduction of on-site solar mean GRC will remain a viable part of the Scottish Rugby Union and the region for the foreseeable future.
Graham Low, President of GRC, drove that point home when he extolled, “The loan we received [from RES] for the [solar] panels has not only enabled us to save a lot of money, but is also a very visible sign of our commitment to reducing the Club’s environmental impact.”
 
GREENWASHING BY TOKYO 2020 OLYMPIC ORGANIZING COMMITTEE?
Writing in the May 11 edition of Vocativ^, Ray Lemire reported The Rainforest Action Network (RAN) claimed there is “evidence that the Japanese government is using tropical wood sourced from Shin Yang, a [large conglomerate with a logging operation] in the State of Sarawak, Malaysia, with a record of human rights abuses, illegal logging, and rainforest destruction.” To bring attention to this issue, RAN has submitted petitions with 140,000 signatures to Japanese embassies and staged protests both in Malaysia and at the Olympic Stadium site.
Since wood figures prominently in traditional Japanese architecture, from pagodas to shrines, it is fitting that the Tokyo Olympic Stadium is being constructed with a wooden lattice. And Tokyo 2020 organizers have a detailed code for sustainably sourcing timber, available for public view. Activists say the Tokyo 2020 Organizing Committee are not living up to the code and are thus greenwashing.
They first voiced their concerns in April about the use of Shin Yang wood from Sarawak, where illegal logging is widespread and the destruction of forests is one of the most severe cases in the world. Photos, which appeared on on the RAN website documented that the wood was indeed from Shin Yang.
 

Construction of the Tokyo Olympic Stadium. The Shin Yang marker is inside the red oval. (Photo credit: Rainforest Action Network)

Close-up of the Shin Yang mark. (Photo credit: Rainforest Action Network)

 
The Japan Sport Council (JSC) confirmed the wood’s Shin Yang/Sarawak provenance but, in a statement to The Huffington Post, also said, “The plywood in question has been certified by the Program for the Endorsement of Forest Certification, an international non-profit organization dedicated to promoting sustainable forest management. They further confirmed it is in compliance with the legal and sustainability aspects of the sourcing standards set by the Tokyo 2020 Organizing Committee.”
How is that possible?
RAN claims that the sourcing standards used by organizers have a significant loophole that allows “formwork plywood” to be used in molding concrete, thus giving Shin Yang a pass and Tokyo 2020, it says here, a greenwashing problem. Especially when one considers the stadium design was chosen, per Lemire in Vocativ, “in part because of its lesser environmental footprint that will serve as the crown jewel of an Olympic Games touting sustainability.”
 

# Edinburgh and Glasgow Warriors, the two biggest rugby union clubs in Scotland, play in (professional) Guinness Pro 12 Rugby against teams from Ireland, Italy, Northern Ireland and Wales.

^ Vocativ is a website site claiming to use “deep web (GSB’s itals) technology as a force for good and go where others can’t to reveal hidden voices, emerging trends and surprising data”

Please comment below!

Email us: [email protected]

Friend us on Facebook: http://facebook.com/greensportsblog

Tweet us: @GreenSportsBlog