Stanford’s athletics program is looking to become carbon neutral with a new initiative led by junior track and cross country runner Emma Fisher, according to The Stanford Daily.
Fisher, a member of the group Students for Sustainable Stanford (SSS), began researching the carbon footprint caused by her team’s travel, and then every other team at the university. With Fisher’s lead, a number of other programs at Stanford came together to create student-initiative Stanford Carbon Offsets to Reduce Emissions (SCORE).
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SCORE has teamed up with carbon offset company 3degrees in order to craft a plan that will see all of Stanford’s travel emissions equalized with a landfill methane energy project. Stanford will invest money into producing clean energy from this landfill methane, thereby annulling the carbon their sports teams pump into the atmosphere with road trips. The funds for the project come out to be about $3,062.
SCORE’s funding this year came entirely from grants, as it is a sort of pilot program in this first year. The carbon offsetting only covers in-season sports, and those trips outside a team’s given season of play are not covered in the program at the moment.
This marks a positive trend that should hopefully catch on with college programs. It is doubtful that this sort of project will become popular in the sphere of professional sports, seeing as they have a bit of a different agenda than college programs but it’s a nice place to start and can hopefully become a building block.