About

We Play Green was found by Chris Dickerson of the Cincinnati Reds and Jack Cassel of the Cleveland Indians. This organization is focused on bringing professional athletes together to help inspire the communities that support us into action to build awareness of the power we have to reverse the environmental crisis we are just beginning to recognize.

As baseball players, we use enormous quantities of plastic. Whether it is bottled water, Gatorade, Vitamin water and/or juice, hundreds of plastic bottles are used on a daily basis. The average one-liter water bottle that weighs in at 16 grams of PET (polyethylene teraphthalate) requires .00052 barrels of oil to produce.

According to the Beverage Marketing Corporation, sales of bottled water in the United States far outstrip those in any other part of the world. Americans alone consumed 31.2 billion liters of bottled water in 2008. This means that approximately 16.224 million barrels of oil were used to make the plastic containers for America’s water. That is about three-quarters of one day’s consumption of the oil in the United States.

The National Association for PET Container Resources indicates that a total of 1.17 billion pounds of plastic bottles - water bottles, soda bottles, milk bottles - were recycled in America in 2007. When the bottles are recycled, they are delivered to a material recovery facility for sorting and then the sorted bottles are baled to reduce shipping costs to reclaimers. The process of reclaiming plastic bottles involves chopping them into flakes, washing them to remove contaminants and subsequently reselling the resulting material to a user who will manufacture new products with it (i.e. clothing, carpet or more PET bottles).

Conversely, America lags far behind many nations, especially throughout Europe, in its efforts to recycle. What happened to the 3.9 billion pounds of plastic that was not recycled in 2007? An enormous amount of PET containers ended up in the ocean, where the plastic breaks down into tiny durable particles that are ingested by open-ocean filter feeders - sea life such a coral, sponges, and whales - and eventually kills them. Some plastic bottles end up in landfills where, like plastic bags, they may never completely decompose. Others are converted to heat and electricity in a waste-to-energy process, usually through incineration, which, in turn, creates more carbon emissions.

In every case, throwing a plastic bottle in the garbage can rather than in the recycling bin further degrades the environment in a measurable way.

We Play Green is a call to action throughout all of professional sports to provide stadiums, locker rooms and playing fields with the proper recycling receptacles and outlets to help corral the amount of plastic that is used during the extent of the season. We need our players, front office and managerial personnel to help in this fight to clean up the environment. We will call upon team officials to cooperate with city officials as well as local recycling outlets to help provide the necessary equipment. In addition, our call to action extends to the millions of sports fans on how they can play green in their every day lives.

We are also working to get every team to utilize reusable water bottles, largely cutting the use of plastic water bottles throughout the clubhouse and on the field in the hotter months of the season. The SIGG COMPANY, a leading manufacturer of Swiss made aluminum water bottles, has agreed to supply the Cincinnati Reds with 50 bottles this coming 2009 season to help reduce the use of plastic bottles throughout spring training and the regular season. These bottles are highly durable and specially forged to maximize durability and longevity. They proved to be a great help in the locker room since and because of them, players limited their use of plastic. The next transition in this process is to limit the amount of water bottles purchased by the team and replace them with water jugs.  Players will use these to fill up their re-usable aluminum bottles and make huge contributions to the reduction of the use of plastic throughout the baseball season.

Some of the steps we all have to take in our daily lives to help heal our environment may seem simple, however, we know it is difficult to change the way we live. Therefore, we must find the balance in the dilemma that all of us experience. From a powerful thirst to the convenience of 24/7 markets, plastic bottles are sold everywhere we go, and as a result we must demonstrate a strong desire to act consistently environmentally responsible.

As professional athletes, we are in the enviable position of being well known and, we hope, admired for our work on, and off, the field. We believe it is our responsibility to contribute to the betterment of our world in any way we can.  We hope we can influence and inspire our fans, peers and others to not only think about what we’re doing to our environment, but to take an active role in ending the damage.

We hope you will join us.