Dallas Cowboys Go Blue (with a Greener Stadium)

It’s time for Super Bowl XLIII, and the NFL is powering the entire event with renewable energy, as well as planting trees to offset carbon created by activities related to the big game. For 16 years, “going green” has been a part of planning and producing the Super Bowl. But the Super Bowl isn’t the only green venue in the NFL world.

Elizabeth Frisch, president of Culture Technologies

In a press release last October, the Dallas Cowboys, along with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), announced that the Cowboys were on a path “to be the first sports stadium to gain recognition in the EPA’s National Environmental Performance Track program.” This bold action is in conjunction with the design and construction of the new Dallas Cowboys Stadium, which will be open for business in Arlington, Texas next summer.

The Cowboys hired Culture Technologies, Inc., led by Elizabeth Frisch, to help implement the EPA program at their new stadium. In a recent interview with Frisch, she described several of the issues the stadium design and construction teams will consider as they begin their EMS. This is part 2 of a two-part interview with Frisch about her work at Culture Technologies.

FRISCH: The Cowboys had decided they wanted to join the National Environmental Performance Track. This is a U.S. EPA environmental recognition program that requires you to put in an environmental management system (EMS) and continually improve and measure your environmental performance, year after year.

For the Cowboys, this isn’t just, We’re putting in a green building, or We’re putting in a green product; this is an entire process. It’s infinite. As long as the system is in place, it drives continual improvement, so every year you raise the bar and take on something more. It’s a very robust and powerful model, if done correctly. We had been recommended to the Cowboys because of our reputation in making culture changes leading to performance improvement.

Greening the Dallas Cowboys Stadium will require a cultural change for fans used to littering the parking lot.

BPGL: Was this move prompted by a desire to save money?

FRISCH: The new stadium will hold up to 90,000 people at one time. That’s an entire city sitting in one spot for an extended period of time — and consuming food and beverages. The Cowboys management said, “We want to save money. This new stadium is going to kill us with utility costs and consumption. And we know we’re not doing certain things efficiently.”

So, we audited a playoff game last November. We looked at how the fans, the employees, the contractors, the vendors, and everyone who came in and out of that stadium during a game used it. We looked at the behaviors that are driving the footprint consumption, as well as what they’re consuming. It’s different from a utility audit, where a consultant just goes out and tells you how to save money. We do culture change, behavior-based audits. We actually stood in the bathroom and watched how people used the space, what their habits were. We asked people questions, like, “Why did you throw this here?” There’s also a lot of social thought that goes into such an audit, to determine why the behavior is happening.

Once we identify behaviors, such as discarding paper, we track the discarded item’s movement from that point on. We do it both from a recycling and an energy-consumption standpoint.

BPGL: What other activities did you look at?

FRISCH: We looked at utilities and any kind of resource consumption — whether it be paper, food, or even people’s time. We also looked at how traffic comes in and out; the longer a car idles, the more emissive it is. It’s about getting the highest level of efficiency around consuming each resource.

Tailgating is a "big deal" on game days, and generates huge amounts of waste.

For a stadium, tailgating is a big deal. There are companies around the stadium that become tailgating locations on game day, and huge amounts of recyclable aluminum end up in the trash or on the street. How do we incentivize people to not dump that stuff?

BPGL: At the stadium, which items in the waste stream will you recycle?

FRISCH: The Cowboys use cups that are recyclable. They’re also collector’s items. The ideal thing is that most people take them home. But if they don’t take them home, they’re number 5 plastic and can be recycled.

And cardboard is a huge waste stream. It’s a matter of just segregating the types, but you still have to get people to do it.

BPGL: What about food waste?

FRISCH: With any stadium, there are huge amounts of food production. I think the new stadium will have five separate kitchens. And these are huge. They’ll be feeding 90,000 people. They have beautiful suites, and they’ll do full catering for those suites.

Kitchens provide opportunities for cost savings in energy, packaging, and food.

The ways they use the kitchens and stage the food and open freezer doors and turn on the ovens create a huge carbon footprint. But that can be reduced just by getting people to take small steps. It’s as simple as turning on the shrink-wrap machine only for the first and last hour, instead of leaving it on for the entire game, when no one is using it.

We also looked at how they’re disposing of the grease and even how much food they’re throwing away. We examine habits that people do automatically.

BPGL: People across the country are changing out light bulbs to use CFLs. Are there similar savings to be made with lighting at the stadium?

FRISCH: We looked at how the cleaning crew uses the lighting in the stadium when the fans aren’t there. There’s huge wattage in those lights, and the default is that they just leave everything on when they clean. They can turn off some of the lights and save about $500 an hour.

Turning off some of the stadium lights during cleanup could save $500 each hour.

BPGL: What are some suggestions you gave them?

FRISCH: That’s where the social engineering part comes in. We can tell people what to do, like turn off the lights, stage the food a certain way, separate the recycling, add more recycling bins in certain areas. But people actually know all that. You can go to any website on the top ten things you can do for the environment and get that list.

The missing piece that we’re working on is, how do you get them to commit to doing the action? We know what action they have to do. What we’re training them to do is to create the framework that will get people to actually commit to doing those actions. That’s the behavioral change side of it.

BPGL: How do you get people to change entrenched behaviors?

FRISCH: I wish there was a cookie cutter answer to explain how you change someone’s behavior. It’s helping them think about, Why does the tailgater put it here? and What is the only thing they would need to make them not put it there? This varies by city. Each fan base has its own personality. Geographically, there are some things that fly easier in certain parts of the country, and other things that don’t, depending on what the culture is.

One of the things we have them working on first is what they can control directly. And of course, what they can control directly is their employees, their vendors, and their contractors.

One of the biggest waste streams is the packaging the food comes in.

BPGL: We hear a lot about “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.” It seems that the stadium has the recycling aspect covered. What have you recommended to them about reducing and reusing?

FRISCH: Ideally, “Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle” is the hierarchy. Recycling is actually the last thing you want to do. We start by asking, What are all the things we can reduce at the source? Then, What can we reuse? Then, What can we recycle?

One of their biggest waste streams is the packaging that the food comes in. They pay twice for it. They pay for that box or wrapper to get manufactured and sold, and then they pay to throw it away. So we tell them to go back to their supplier or vendor and say, “This particular product is taking up 30 percent of our waste stream. We want to continue doing business with you, but we want you to propose a packaging that uses half as much.” That’s greening the supply chain.

BPGL: You said you don’t have a composting set up for the food waste. Do you have any ways of reusing the food waste stream?

FRISCH: Typically, the short answer for the Cowboys Stadium is, “Not at this time,” although we’re looking at lots of different options. Initially, what they committed to is energy reduction, water reduction, and solid waste reduction. So for year one of their EMS, we’re looking at projects in those areas.

Each year, we’ll revisit projects. Composting is not on this year’s. list. But, as composting is becoming more popular, the cost of taking all that food waste goes down, because a composter is less than 60 miles away.

Fans leave paper and food waste behind when they leave the stadium.

BPGL: How will you encourage fans to make good choices?

FRISCH: We have to consider what type of recycle bins to use, how far fans have to walk to get to one, what kind of stuff to put up on the big screen to make it amusing and entertaining to recycle, and what to give away as a reward. Everybody likes Cowboys paraphernalia here.

We’d like to incentivize the behavior before we punish it — and punishment is a bad word. There’s a consequence if you use up the environment. There’s damage, so there’s a consequence. But even fear of death doesn’t cause people to change their behaviors. A study was published a couple years back, in which they said that 90 percent of patients who had had a heart attack, even being told they would certainly die if they didn’t change their ways, didn’t change their ways. So, that’s the dynamic you’re looking at. Even fear of death doesn’t make people change their behavior. You have to get behind what views are driving their results and getting them to commit. Commitment is the only thing that can pull us out.

BPGL: What’s the next step at the Cowboy Stadium?

FRISCH: The one great thing about behavior change around the environment is that it’s evolutionary. So the exciting thing about the Cowboy Stadium — and all the stadiums — is that they can put in one program, then the next, then the next. And as the consciousness raises, there’s infinite stuff to do. If you get champions, you can enroll the fan base and take certain things on. We want to start looking at, What will the fans be willing to do?

Sports teams can flip fan behavior and get them to act in more responsible ways.

There really are infinite ways to get people to transform their behavior. It’s just that we’re so used to either putting a law or some kind of gate in place, but that’s really not effective. People will still break the law. People will still break the rules.

BPGL: How will you assess the effectiveness of the Cowboys’ program?

FRISCH: They’ll review their performance annually. We’ll initially help them do it. One of the great things about taking on the National Environmental Performance Track and an EMS is that they will have the capability of doing it themselves. Then every three years, if they want to stay in the EPA’s program, they need an outside, third party to do that for them.

BPGL: Are other sports teams as progressive as the Cowboys at going green?

FRISCH: The sports teams are really on the cusp. A lot of them are looking at LEED. A lot of them are looking at recycling. It’s only a matter of time before they realize they have a fan base and employee base they can flip and deliver on those behaviors. Considering what they spend on operations, it’s a very nominal amount of money to support that environmental change.

Just so you know, their new tagline is, “Dallas Cowboys Go Blue.” They’re in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, and it’s a non-attainment area for air quality, so blue is clean air. And blue is clean water, and recycling, and lowering our carbon footprint. With leadership from the Dallas Cowboys, we’re hoping the word will spread and all fans will follow the team’s lead. The goal is not just a better stadium, but a better world for all of us.

Part 1: Culture Change Drives Environmental Improvement

Part 2: Dallas Cowboys Go Blue (for a Greener Stadium) (Top of Page)

Julia Wasson

Blue Planet Green Living

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Renewable Energy: A Tool for Social Equity

Culture Change Drives Environmental Improvement

“What I’m doing is socially engineering organizations by working with employees so they can shift their company culture and drive business performance — and even personal performance,” says Elizabeth Frisch, president of Culture Technologies, Inc. and director of development for A Nurtured World.“

Susan Roothaan and Elizabeth Frisch of Culture Technologies and A Nurtured World.

One of the things we’re committed to is inspiring people, enrolling them, and getting them connected with their passions in the workplace. This is just like we do on the consumer side with A Nurtured World, getting people to commit to green living in their home, so that being environmental is not about suffering, deprivation, and “something else that is on my To-Do list.” Instead, you create space around it, so that it’s this open frontier. There’s all this possibility!”

Culture Technologies is working with the Dallas Cowboys to green their new Cowboy Stadium, a topic you’ll read about in tomorrow’s post. Today, we talk with Elizabeth about how Culture Technologies helps businesses become more environmentally responsible through culture change. We spoke with Frisch from her office in Austin, Texas.

FRISCH: We founded Culture Technologies, Inc. back in 2002. I joke that I’m a recovering chemical engineer. I really thought that I could design things so that they work, and if I just did the process complete enough, or made the project perfect enough, that it would be implementable, and it would happen, and people would do it, and it would get done.

I started my career back in the late ’80s, and one of the things over the years that kept coming up for me was, no matter how well I designed something, no matter how well I designed the product, no matter how perfect my work product was, if people didn’t do it, use it, take it on, or commit to it, it was a failure. It was a waste of money for my clients.

And so, I had one of those “Aha!” moments that something was missing. And what was missing was, we kind of treat people as functions in a process instead of living, breathing, non-predictable beings. We put a lot of emphasis on designing out the human element. We think, If we just put enough systems in place, the mistakes, or why people don’t do what they should, will go away. But the reality of it is, you can’t design that out. All of our organizational systems are made up of people.

BPGL: You’re the director of development for A Nurtured World, founded by Susan Roothaan. How did the two of you begin working together?

FRISCH: I met Susan in the 2000-01 time frame. She had been doing a lot of research on how to get consumers to change behavior, and I had been consulting on changing people’s behavior at their company. What we realized was, we were both using some robust techniques, tools, and models to help people get power over their own ability to change their behavior as well as transform others’.

A Nurtured World workshop participants work together on a home project.

Susan had set up A Nurtured World as a nonprofit in 1997 to work with the consumer, but we wanted to take it a step further and help organizations do the same thing.

BPGL: Why organizations, when Susan was already doing personal change workshops?

FRISCH: What’s the biggest thing people always yell out about their job? “It’s bureaucracy! The system or company won’t let me do it.” There’s this thing called “organizational culture” that people say is the reason why things aren’t going the way they should. So we started developing techniques we had already been using with clients, but hadn’t really created as a product in themselves, to start going in and actually working to shift organizational culture.

We worked hard our first couple of years out just to get all those models in place that define how you shift culture, and how you inspire people, and how you have enrollment conversations, and how you get people to make commitments and have integrity, and all those things that are required to have an organization that’s transformational and can do amazing things around the environment.

That was the birth of it. Although I say I’m a recovering chemical engineer, I spend most of my career doing social engineering now. I love my engineering background. It’s been amazing, because when you work in environmental stuff, you’re dealing with science, you need it just as much.

BPGL: When you say that you’re changing behavior, you sound like a psychological, behavioral engineer, rather than a chemical engineer. How did you get into the psychological end of this?

FRISCH: It was more from a fascination in my own personality with what makes people tick. I’ve always been curious about human nature in general. I also have been very frustrated with myself about when I can’t change something, as to why I can’t change. And so I started doing research of my own on what’s missing. I’m an engineer, I’ve got to have the data. I started reading books and talking with people. Then I met Susan. She had a consumer conservation model she was using, and I thought, This makes sense and works!

BPGL: What’s behind the name of your company, Culture Technologies?

FRISCH: We help people understand the nature of culture. My mom used to tell me that “no” was the start of negotiations for me. I literally came out of the womb that way. That’s a pretty unique trait, I’ve discovered. For most people, “no” is no, and they quit. And if you’re going to do anything transforming culture or dealing with a bureaucracy or creating any kind of social change, “no” is a really common answer.

You're not changing the status quo, if you're not getting resistance.

One of the other things that we do is help give people who are working in organizations a deep understanding of culture, in general, but specifically their culture. We actually help them identify their culture in black and white. It gives them some power of understanding and room to take action. It’s just the nature of culture to resist change. People make resistance wrong, but resistance is great! You’re not up to anything if you’re not hitting a resistance. You’re not changing the status quo, if you’re not getting resistance. We do exercises around changing people’s relationship with resistance and with getting told “no.”

We’ve made getting told “no” into a failure. Failure is looked at as wrong! But Susan and I have created exercises we hope free people from letting failures stop them. It gives them a context to see what failure really is, so they can just let it go. If you want to be up to social change, it’s not a perfect path to enlightenment. If it were, we’d all be in heaven right now. We’re creating people who can lead, no matter what their job title and what circumstances they find themselves in.

BPGL: How do the companies you work with use your trainings to improve performance?

FRISCH: Companies can use our training to drive performance in any aspect of their organization. But our passion is driving environmental performance. We want to make a difference in footprint reduction on the environment. So we’ve taken all those models we’ve developed, and we use them very specifically to drive environmental performance improvement.

For example, we helped Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) put in their commute-solutions program to get employees out of their cars, even when gas prices are low. We were getting them out of their cars before gas prices went up, and we’re continuing to do that after prices have come down. It’s those kinds of tangibles, like getting people to actually choose to do the desirable behavior and get measurable positive outcome.

BPGL: Have you worked with any municipalities?

FRISCH: One of the projects we just finished is that we worked on a contract for the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ). They’re the environmental regulatory agency here in Texas. We helped 11 cities implement a performance-based environmental management system around their operations. The cities of Waco, Lubbock, and Austin, and eight cities in the Dallas/Fort Worth area went through that process with us. It took about a year. Cities are reducing their carbon footprints, too. It just makes sense.

Culture Technologies is working with Dallas and 10 other Texas cities.

Businesses got savvy to going green earlier, because they have a profit base. Now cities are dealing with strapped budgets and high fuel prices, and other things. They’re finally realizing that they have to do the same processes that businesses have to do in order to keep their employees and keep growing and keep providing the quality of service. A city is a business, but it’s in the business of keeping their residents’ quality of life high.

It was a coached approach, so each city had a certain number of staff that they volunteered to come to the classes, and we would coach them, provide models, and practice what they learned. They would get homework, and we would do workdays and site days.

BPGL: How are you assessing the impact of your work with these cities?

FRISCH: We’re just getting to the measurement phase this year. Our goal was to get all 11 cities into the Clean Texas program, which requires them to commit to environmental goals and carbon footprint reductions. One of our first measurements is that all 11 cities are supposed to get into the Clean Texas program in the next three months. Then, annually thereafter, they report their outcomes and what they’ve accomplished. So by March or April, I’ll have the metric of how many actually did it and what exactly they committed to. Then one year later, we’ll get their measurables and see what they’ve accomplished.

People shy away from measurement. That’s one of the reasons I think environmental activities have not gotten the attention or respect they should. If you don’t measure it, you can’t prove it. And when you’re dealing with something that’s business- or money-based, you’ve got to be able to put it into those terms. Or else, it wasn’t really successful.

For social change programs, too, one of the things Susan and I work on for organizations is, How do you measure that it improved? Even on warm and fuzzy stuff, you still have to figure out a concrete way of measuring behavior change. So what do we measure? Susan just did a grant project that was all around, How do you measure? What do you measure? Is it working? Well, you can say, the traditional measurements are, We contacted so many people, or We handed so many of these out, or This many people took this home. But that doesn’t say whether it resulted in a change in behavior. That just measures that you put knowledge out there.

BPGL: So, how do you measure change?

Getting a measure of recycling is straightforward.

FRISCH: That depends on the behavior. If it’s an easy behavior change like recycling, it’s a real easy measurement. How many people are recycling? How much are they recycling? Is it going up? That’s a very straightforward one, because you can measure pounds. But, if it’s a social change, you can ask, How many people are now routinely donating to an organization? There are other behaviors you have to look at and quantify.

I think this next generation of environmental performance is going to come from organizations who recognize that true sustainability and long-term performance improvement will only happen if the culture supports it. Otherwise, things will just keep going back to the status quo. It’s exciting to be a part of the process supporting that shift for organizations and use my “engineering” skills in ways I never imagined.

Part 1: Culture Change Drives Environmental Improvement (Top of Page)

Part 2: Dallas Cowboys Go Blue (for a Greener Stadium)

Julia Wasson

Blue Planet Green Living (Home Page)

Related Posts:

Improve Quality of Life by Reducing Your Carbon Footprint

Save the Planet (and Money) by Living Your Values

Renewable Energy: A Tool for Social Equity