Middlebury College
IN-2: Innovation 2

The Green Panther Challenge is a new program through the Office of Sustainability Integration (OSI) and Athletics that seeks to engage student athletes and their fans by challenging them to up their practice of sustainability in sports. OSI and Athletics are working together each year by choosing a challenge theme for teams to work on throughout their season. Teams, under the leadership of their coaches and Green Liaisons, meet the yearly challenge on two levels: 1. Individual teams set their own "better practices" for team-efforts to meet the challenge, such as better recycling in the locker rooms, using reusable water bottles, minimizing their use of disposable items etc. 2. OSI and Athletics host department-wide events throughout all 3 seasons that aim to engage fans in helping meet the challenge during games. Players and teams can play a key role in making this a success. This year’s theme is Waste Reduction. We held a series of “Perfect Sort” game days, where our goal is to have fans correctly sort all their waste during the game into recycling, compost and trash in order to reduce what goes into the landfill.

Waste sorting rates increased from 5% correct sorting to 95% correct sorting over the course of the year. 30 student athlete volunteers were involved in Perfect Sort Gamedays, and hundreds of fans were reached.