Cardinal Chaos

This was a really fun video piece to do. It's about the aftermath of a men's basketball game. Check it out:

It was based on an article I wrote a few weeks before. Here's an excerpt:

What do you remember from Saturday’s men’s basketball game?

Everyone remembers who won. Many remember the score. Some remember which player fouled out. But few remember the Pepsi cup beneath their seat or the popcorn spilled on the floor. By the end of the season, these forgotten items have turned into approximately 14,000 pounds of trash, just under the weight of two average elephants.


“The stadium is an incredible mess,” Kevin Danna said. Danna has been a student manager for the men’s basketball team for the past four years. “There are bottles everywhere, papers, and the popcorn—I couldn’t have imagined it before. It’s everywhere. I guess people really, really like popcorn.”

On a full night, Maples Pavilion holds just under 7,300 people. By the end of the night, these fans have left behind approximately 70 bags of trash and 25 bags of recycling.

With the trash bags weighing approximately 10 pounds, a men’s basketball season produces about the same amount of trash as the average person over eight and a half years.

A cleaning crew of 16 spends up to six hours cleaning it all up. They spend two hours just picking up the trash. They find mostly food, ticket stubs, bottles, programs and souvenirs.

Have they ever found anything interesting?

“Actually, we found drugs one time,” Joel Perez said. Perez is the manager of the cleaning staff. “It was a bag with marijuana in it. It was in one of the trashcans. We had to call the police in.”

The student section is a neat freak’s worst nightmare.

After Sunday’s game against Washington, there were 34 copies of “The Dirt”—the student fan club’s fliers—seven bottles, 13 napkins, one half-eaten box of fries, 21 red-and-white pom poms and one corner of lined paper with a 650 number scribbled on it. Add the dirt from roughly 300 jumping students, and the result wasn't very pretty.

But it’s nothing a few staff members and a leaf blower can’t handle.

The 6th Man Committee, the group in charge of mobilizing student basketball fans, hands out copies of “The Dirt” to students before the game. The tasteful sheet has the visiting team’s roster and, of course, “The Ugly Dude of the Game.” Some deserving players even warrant a page of embarrassing Facebook pictures on the back.

The committee prints 300 copies of “The Dirt” for conference games and 150 for non-conference games. That’s 3,900 sheets each season. Add the stat sheets from each of the eight scheduled time-outs, and there’s just under 12,000 sheets of paper floating around the stadium.

“Really? That seems like a lot of paper,” Tony Kovscek said. Kovscek is a professor in the Energy Resources Engineering Department at Stanford. “That’s about a tree and a half, 50 feet tall and eight inches in diameter.”

Laundry is a whole other story.

Danna said the team goes through approximately 60 hand towels, 20 shower towels, 15 jerseys, 30 warm-up outfits (shooting shirts, sweatpants and sweatshirts) and piles of socks each game. The visiting team doubles the towel count.

“The amount of laundry is pretty incredible,” Danna said. “It took awhile to get used to it all. I remember the first couple of times, you just kind of pick it up by your fingernails…” he said, pretending to grab the corner of some dirty laundry. Danna said now he just digs in without thinking twice.

He said it takes six loads in the stadium’s two industrial washers to clean it all. The washers use just under 25,000 gallons of water each season, enough to fill the average swimming pool.

According to Kovscek, this is roughly the equivalent of the average household’s yearly indoor water usage.

“This sounds pretty environmentally friendly to me,” Kovscek said. “These industrial washers are actually quite efficient.”

And there are some perks to laundry duty.

“One time I found Jordan Hill’s headband from when we played Arizona this year,” Danna said. Hill is the leading scorer and rebounder for the Wildcats. “It’s currently sitting in the backseat of my car. This game was January 24. It’s probably pretty disgusting, but I do plan on washing it one day and sporting it.”

The student managers are also in charge of cleaning up the locker rooms. According to Danna, they find about 60 water and Gatorade bottles in the home locker room and 50 in the visiting team’s room. That’s more than 2,000 plastic bottles each season, about 13 times the yearly average of an individual.

“I think it’s about time to get a water cooler,” Kovscek said.

According to many of the facilities’ staff, men’s basketball causes the second largest mess at sporting events on campus, after football.

“Football stadiums have finally gotten some attention because of the sheer amount of waste they produce,” Julie Muir said. Muir is a manger at the Stanford Recycling Center. She said basketball stadiums are often slower to get up-to-speed with environmental advancements. They are too big to be easily managed like a café or an office, but just small enough to get overshadowed by football venues.

“I will give Maples a lot of credit for trying to move forward,” Muir said. “Events are really a totally different environment because you have a new guest every time and they’re not thinking about recycling. It’s all about the game and the entertainment.”

Erin Gaines, a sustainability coordinator for Stanford Dining, said the biggest improvement the stadium could make would be using all compostable products. This would allow fans to throw everything in one bin. “But when you sell Pepsi products, you have to use the Pepsi cup,” she said. “So we’re always going to run into problems until we can pressure companies to make compostable products.”

Skip Braatz, the Assistant Athletic Director at Maples, said that the university recently received a grant from the State of California to increase the number of recycling bins in all sporting venues, including Maples. “We always recycle everything we possibly can,” he added.

However, the cleaning crew has not been recycling any of the trash left behind at the men’s basketball games this season.

“Three months ago, we stopped recycling,” Perez said. “Because the stadium said they didn’t have enough money to pay us and we took two more hours.” Braatz did not wish to comment on the cleaning crew. Perez has since said that the staff was asked to resume recycling.

Gaines said that Stanford Dining will eventually transform Maples into a zero waste facility. Stanford Dining is currently working on making Axe and Palm zero waste and Tressider will be next. Gaines predicted that the group will not work on any athletic facilities until at least next year.

“The biggest part is probably going to be training the fans,” she said. “You’re up against this culture of ‘Go, Go, Go!’ You’re focused on the game and then getting out of there fast.”

Danna agrees. “If I were in the stands, I wouldn’t care if I just sat a water bottle down and didn’t think twice about it. It’s not the fans’ jobs to clean it up.”

Well that might change, but for now, we’ll leave the fans to their cheering, the cleaning staff to their sorting, and Danna to his piles of dirty socks.