Eco-friendliness has been seeping into pro baseball for a while, and now it’s pretty much official: America’s pastime has gone green. Major League Baseball partnered with NRDC at the start of the season to encourage teams to, um, win at sustainability. Head to a ball game near you, and chances are you’ll toss your plastic beer cup into a recycling bin, gaze upon a solar-powered scoreboard, and pee in a no-flush urinal (sorry, men only). Scouts are traveling in fuel-efficient vehicles; stadiums are converting used cooking oil to biofuel; and teams are offsetting their carbon footprint. With 80 million spectators attending MLB games each year, the trend toward greenness is welcomed. “[T]his is signaling a cultural shift that I think is unprecedented, to have Major League Baseball embracing environmentalism,” says NRDC’s Allen Hershkowitz. “It’s apple pie, it’s motherhood, it’s baseball, it’s environmentalism.”
