Under the category of "every little bit helps", today's Detroit Lions game has gone green. Cool idea. Imagine if every NFL team did this, if only for one day.
The Detroit Lions say they'll take on the Green Bay Packers without warming the globe, buying a stake in a replanted rain forest in Ecuador to offset the up to 933 tons of carbon dioxide the Thanksgiving Day game is expected to generate.
The Lions will follow the standards for greenhouse gas offsets laid down by the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, according to the environmental engineering company handling Thursday's "green game" at Ford Field.
Michigan-based Carbon Credit Environmental Services Inc. approached Lions vice chairman Bill Ford and family about the idea, and they jumped at the chance. They set about calculating the carbon emissions of one football game, and bought trees to counter the effect for the first "carbon neutral" NFL game.
In the case of the Lions-Packers game, that includes the about 28,260 cars that fans use to get to the game, the equivalent of a Boeing 747 load of out-of-state visitors, and the stadium's electricity, water and natural gas use.
The company calculated that the total would not exceed 933 tons of carbon dioxide.
To offset that output, the company sold the Lions a stake in its 150,000-tree "carbon sink" tree plantation in Ecuador. The trees were planted six years ago, and they are estimated to absorb 3.5 to six tons of carbon dioxide each over their lifetime.
To be safe, Carbon Credit Environmental Services sold the Lions a stake in 500 trees.
Visit CCES on the web here. Thanks go out to the Lions and Bill Ford for doing this.
Happy Thanksgiving everyone!