GAME NATURE OF

FAR LEFT: Green Street? Under the Boardrider portfolio, the DC Shoes brand has made bold commitments to sustainability.

A Cultural Movement

FC, and Manchester City jostling each year for the top spot of the Green League and why sports stars like distance swimmer Lewis Pugh or the NBA’s Ricky Rubio, routinely pop up as environmental ambassadors, using their status to engage fans in more sustainable lifestyles.

Among this elite is the former Atlanta Falcons fullback, Ovie Mughelli who, since retiring from the NFL in 2012, has leveraged his platform as an environmental spokesperson to super-charge climate education across North America.

Through his Foundation, Ovie works to engage sports fans in STEM and climate education delivered through sports programmes or curriculums built to bridge the knowledgeaction gap among young people. Other projects include the development of his own comic book, Gridiron Green – a collaborative effort launched with Comics Uniting Nations and UNICEF to support the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals - while, with the support of his wife and business development officer, Masika, the two now push forward a partnership with the NFL Players Association to change NFL culture for good.

Tailgating, for the benefit of UK readers, has become part and parcel of the NFL game day experience – a ritual that sees fans gather for a pre-game ‘festival’ of sorts to eat, drink, party, and, more-often-than-not, get their hands on some merchandise.

“It’s such a huge part of the game culture,” Masika tells Products of Change. “But it traditionally brings with it a lot of waste. At collegiate level, one event can equal a week’s worth of trash of an entire city.”

Ovie and Masika’s Green Tailgating initiative, therefore, has a big task on its hands – but a crucially important one - as it sets out to educate and empower both businesses and individuals to ‘tailgate’ more responsibly.

LEFT: Wearing sustainability on your sleeves. The global licensed sports merch supplier, Fanatics, has refocused its ESG strategy.

“The last Green Tailgate we did was at the Superbowl in Miami,” continues Masika. “It’s our mission to engage people with the enjoyment of being environmentally aware, encouraging people to compost their food waste, to look for better alternatives to bringing their big charcoal grills or throwaway cutlery with them, recycle their trash, and become more mindful of their impact.”

In a similar vein, the Premier League’s Liverpool FC recently reported a 90% recycling rate of food and beverage containers among its fans at home games. The spike has been driven, in part, by an ESG strategy the club has dubbed ‘The Red Way’, a commitment to reduce its scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions by targeting both operational practices and fan engagement. It proves that with the right approach, fan behaviour can be positively influenced.

NORMALISING ‘GREEN’ BEHAVIOUR

So, with sport today becoming a conduit for normalising ‘green’ behaviour where does it leave the consumer products industry that surrounds it? What opportunity does our sector have to lead the conversation around sustainability?

For answers, let’s look at a lifestyle sport notorious for operating in political, social, and environmental ambiguity. Let’s look at skateboarding: a concrete-hungry community of counter-culturalists that – as a recent study led by Dr Paul O’Connor, a veteran

Similar scenes have been witnessed within surf culture where the sport has been chastised recently for its dependency on neoprene and other fossil-fuel derived materials that acts in direct opposition to the sport’s longstanding allegiance to the natural environment.

Plenty is now being done to reverse such actions including new commitments from Boardriders (home, too, of Quicksilver, Billabong and other surf brands) to see ‘100% of products created for the water made with certified recycled, organic, or other responsibly sourced materials’ by the end of 2023.

Product Power

skateboarder and lecturer at the University of Exeter exploring ‘Skateboarding in the Anthropocene’ concluded – is representative of both pollution and sustainability.

Upon the launch of its first ESG report in 2020/21, Boardriders sent out the very clear mission statement to lead sustainability in the board sports lifestyle space. Within its skate brands alone, already 80% of Element’s t-shirts are made from 100% organic cotton while processes involving algae extracts have been working to reverse the impact of water pollution and maintain healthy ecosystems within the production of its latest DC Shoes.

So, while skaters may still face a wider issue regarding where they are able to skate (with many cities employing anti-skate measures, pushing communities into polluted ‘brownfield’ areas dependent on the supply of vast amounts of concrete), Boardriders is bringing sustainability directly into how they do it.

It’s fair to say that sports licensing is on a journey with sustainable development. But it’s one being propelled by the sport industry’s urgency to act fast. Serving more than 100 million fans and 900 leading sports entities around the world, few have better understanding of this responsibility than the global sports licensing firm, Fanatics.

It’s why, for the first time, the business has expanded its ESG focus to the entirety of the Fanatics Holdings portfolio to conduct its first Greenhouse Gas emissions inventory – covering scopes 1 and 2 and expanding into scope 3 over time.

“This comprehensive inventory will enable science-based target setting and data-driven mitigation of our climate impacts,” says Michael Rubin, founder and ceo of Fanatics. “We will also continue to work toward our goal of making our existing US facilities zero waste to landfill by 2030.

“We are just getting started. Achieving our ESG goals is a marathon, not a sprint, and we remain committed to doing better for our community and the planet every single year, over the long-term.”

LEFT: Hats off to them! Fanatics now services over 100 million fans around the world while working with more than 900 leading sports entities.

BELOWLEFT: DC Shoes’ Military Repurpose collection uses surplus materials from military wear.

BELOW: Atlanta Falcons fullback, Ovie Mughelli retired from the NFL in 2012 but uses his leverage to engage sports fans with sustainability.