The Natural Resources Defense Council gives kudos to Bowdoin in its new report, Collegiate Game Changers: How Campus Sport is Going Green. Using Bowdoin as a case study, the NRDC mentions that Bowdoin has two LEED-certified sports venues: the Watson Arena (the first LEED hockey rink in the nation) and the Buck Center. Bowdoin also gets props for treating its athletic fields almost exclusively with organic fertilizer and using high-efficiency lights in its basketball courts, track and indoor tennis courts.

Along with these administrative actions, the NRDC praises the students who in 2012 formed the Bowdoin Green Athletes to develop and implement projects to enhance the sustainability of sports on campus. “The group includes an executive committee that manages student-athlete representatives from all 50 campus sports teams to help shift the culture toward supporting the college’s sustainability goals,” the report explains. Green Athletes operates recycling initiatives at athletics contests, as well as a project that collects used sneakers to supply to micro-entrepreneurs in West Africa.

NRDC issued the 2013 Collegiate Game Changers report “to provide valuable lessons for all campus departments and other organizations, whether they are directly involved with the sports industry or not, highlighting what sports departments, students, venues, and championship events are doing to protect our planet and educate their fans.”