By Leilani Münter competed at Daytona in her first race in two years, spreading her Eco-Vegan message to auto racing fans. SustainU will be making t-shirts from 100 percent recycled content for all 30 MLB clubs again this season, this time with a fun twist. And the US Green Building Council (USGBC) gives a big shout out to LEED-certified sports venues for their important energy saving work. All this in a chock full GSB News & Notes column.
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LEILANI MÜNTER RETURNS TO THE RACETRACK, DRIVES FAST, SPREADS ECO-VEGAN GOSPEL
Leilani Münter, GreenSportsBlog fave and the self-described “eco, vegan, hippie chick with a race car,” hadn’t raced in over two years, owing to a busy schedule of animal rights and environmental activism, documentary film making and a lack of sponsors. That all changed Saturday afternoon at Daytona International Speedway when she strapped into her Vegan Powered Toyota at ARCA Racing Series Presented by Menards season-opener.
Her five year sponsorship sales effort (that’s right, she sells the sponsorships, too) had borne fruit as a collection of nonprofits signed on to help her promote a plant-based diet to stock car racing fans. In a February 17 interview, Münter shared with espnW’s NASCAR writer Bob Pockrass how new lead sponsor A Well-Fed World joined the team after hearing her acceptance speech for winning the Vegan Athlete of the Year award. In addition to the car and crew, the funding also supports a tent that gave away vegan food samples on Saturday. More importantly, Münter will be educating race fans and passing out food samples from her vegan-themed tent located in the fan zone at Sunday’s Daytona 500, NASCAR’s Super Bowl.
Leilani Munter (Photo credit: Arthur Mola/Invision/AP)
“When I’m going to vegan festivals or clean-energy events, it’s preaching to the choir,” Münter told Pockrass. “Giving out the food will probably be the greatest impact I will have. We’re serving the kinds of foods race fans are going to find at the track. I’m not going to show up with kale. I’m showing up with vegan chicken wings and meatballs — stuff they would expect to find at the race track. … We’re not going to open minds if we’re not putting food in their mouths. That is the moment where people change.”
But before Münter dishes out vegan food this weekend, she finally got back on the track on Saturday.
Leilani, as she’s known to her fans, brought them to their feet as she moved into the top-5 during the late stages of the race after qualifying in 17th position out of a stacked 40-car starting field. Catching the lead pack at speeds approaching 200 mph, Münter drafted to catapult herself into fourth position, eyeing a career best finish. Her hopes came to an abrupt end when a trailing car made contact with her rear bumper sending her Toyota up the track and into the outside wall, spawning a multi-car crash. Münter’s crew patched up the damaged Toyota and got her back out on the track to finish the race in a more-than-respectable 19th position.
When Münter gets back on the track is anybody’s guess as her non-profit sponsors are not nearly as deep pocketed as her competitors’ traditional Fortune 1000 backers. As she told espnW’s Pockrass, “[Non-profit sponsors] don’t have multimillion-dollar budgets where they can run a full season. That comes with the territory of me being an activist and wanting my car to carry these cool messages…You work really hard, you get the car on the track, you get one race and then you’re starting over again.”
To hear/see Münter tell her story, click here for her 5 minute interview as part of FOX Sports NASCAR Race Hub’s “Women in Wheels” series.
SUSTAINU ANNOUNCES MLB “T-SHIRT CLUB” FOR 2017; MADE FROM 100% RECYCLED CONTENT
“PLAY BALL!—With t-shirts made from 100 percent recycled content!”
Last summer, Chris Yura, CEO and Founder of Morgantown, WV-based SustainU®, told GreenSportsBlog that his company’s mission is to “chang[e] the way clothes are made to improve the environment [and] reinvigorate America’s manufacturing sector.”
One of the ways the young company is making good on that promise is through sports, manufacturing fan wear from 100 percent recycled content for collegiate sports programs (Notre Dame, Clemson and more), the 2013 America’s Cup in San Francisco, and, starting in 2016, for all 30 Major League Baseball (MLB®) clubs.
With Opening Day 2017 little more than a month away, SustainU announced an extension of its licensing partnership with MLB, with an innovative twist.
The SustainU T-shirt Club allows fans of all 30 clubs to “Wear the Season” with shipments of officially licensed apparel arriving at their doorsteps throughout the year. There are various levels of membership available through the T-shirt Club that determine the timing and quantity of shipments during the 2017 baseball season, ranging from The Lead Off (one shipment of two exclusive tees) to The Homer (four shipments of five exclusive tees, one long sleeve and one fleece item).
The SustainU® T-Shirt Club, 2016 World Champion Chicago Cubs version. (Photo credit: SustainU®)
All SustainU shirts are printed with eco-friendly inks and are Made in the USA, increasing employment opportunities in places like Appalachia that have seen massive globalization-related job losses over several decades.
GreenSportsBlog loves this program—and would love it even more if SustainU could figure out a way to make fewer shipments during the season, thus reducing its carbon footprint. Ideas?
USGBC SAYS LEED CERTIFIED SPORTS VENUES MAKING A MAJOR DIFFERENCE, ENERGY- AND COST-WISE
The Orlando Magic’s Amway Center, the first NBA arena to earn LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Gold certification for new construction, saved almost $1 million a year, including about $700,000 in annual energy costs alone.
Signage at the Amway Center, home of the Orlando Magic, heralding its LEED Gold status. (Photo credit: Amway Center)
In Peoria, AZ, the LEED Gold Peoria Sports Complex, which serves as the spring training facility for the Seattle Mariners and San Diego Padres, saves 322,700 gallons of water and more than 1 million kilowatt hours in electricity annually. In the construction phase, the city convinced its baseball team partners to retain portions of the building frame and outer envelope, saving an estimated $1.5 million on each clubhouse and diverting 1,323 tons of construction waste from landfills. The Mariners’ Clubhouse parking lot was also converted into an impressive array of solar modules that, combined with a 320 kilowatt solar instillation, can offset up to 30% of the clubhouse’s annual reliance on fossil fuels.
Peoria (AZ) Sports Complex, the LEED Gold spring training home of the San Diego Padres and Seattle Mariners. (Photo credit: AZ Central)
These significant accomplishments are but two examples highlighted in a recent US Green Building Council report, LEED in Motion: Venues, which details how LEED certification benefits more than 30 venues’ triple bottom line (People, Planet, Profit).
Venues that incorporate LEED into their buildings increase cost-savings, decrease annual operating costs and see a higher return on investment overall, the report says. This builds on an earlier study, the 2015 Green Building Economic Impact Study, which estimated from 2015-2018 LEED-certified buildings in the US will have saved more than $2.1 billion in combined energy, water, maintenance and waste savings.
Sports stadiums and arenas represent some of the most iconic buildings in any community. Their size and scope—the top 200 stadiums in the US alone draw roughly 181 annual million visitors—allow them to engage, inspire and educate millions of people. They also are big energy users and waste producers—according to Waste Management, the NFL, MLB, NBA and NHL generate a combined 35,000 metric tons of CO2 each year from their fans’ waste. Their high profile combined with their significant room for improvement on energy usage make sports venues an ideal megaphone for Green Building/LEED.
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