Notre Dame Going Even Greener at Football Tailgates

Inside TailgatingBy Carroll Walton

And by greener, we don’t mean the accent color to go along with Notre Dame’s traditional metallic gold and blue. We are talking about the environmentally-friendly practices the University of Notre Dame is implementing at its college football games this fall in a continued effort to be responsible with waste, and we here at Inside Tailgating like the sound of it.College campuses, in many ways, are on the forefront of recycling efforts. The halls of my dorms at Duke University back in the early 1990s were where I first started the practice of recycling cans. Before that the only recycling we saw much of was at school newspaper drives and bottle-cap collections. We have come a long way! This latest report posted on the Notre Dame athletic site just underscores the kind of impact colleges can have by encouraging environmentally-friendly practices when they set the tone on football Saturdays.Some of the highlights from what Notre Dame is doing include their efforts to replace seating in the lower bowl of Notre Dame Stadium with recycled or repurposed materials, using LED lighting to reduce power consumption by 60 percent, and the hands-on efforts by student groups to help tailgaters recycle. Notre Dame started its Game Day Recycling Program in 2008, but the school has expanded it this year to include handing out recycling and trash bags to every car entering tailgate lots, employing recycling push-carts in the lots for some hands-on help with the process, and sending out attendants into the lots to help educate fans on how and what they can recycle. Kudos to the Irish!