A new campaign fights for zero waste at FIFA World Cup 2026
With the FIFA World Cup taking place in less than a year, host cities Vancouver and Toronto are working hard to accommodate both the incoming national teams and their fans with new infrastructure. But a conservation group hopes to convince the hosts to consider the tournament's enormous waste footprint, too.
Oceana Canada, an independent ocean conservation charity, has announced a campaign to mitigate the waste generated by spectators at the games. Their #ReuseForTheWin campaign calls on MLSE and BCPavco to replace single-use food and beverage containers in Vancouver's BC Place and Toronto's BMO Field ahead of the tournament. According to Oceana Canada, this could avoid the littering of 2.3 million single-use items over the course of the tournament.
'We're asking the question, do you want to have a legacy of trash coming out of the venues? Or do you want to have these stadiums upgraded [so] that you can say we've set the new global sustainability sports standard?' said Anthony Merante, senior plastics campaigner at Oceana Canada.
With Toronto's landfill nearing maximum capacity, and questions on how future waste is to be managed, an abundance of single-use items is daunting. Incorporating reusable food and beverage container systems turns off the tap of the overflowing waste-tub, says Merante.
'It puts less things in the landfill. It costs less for waste management, costs [less] for taxpayers, and it costs less directly for the city to clean up a lot of this garbage if we don't make the garbage in the first place,' Merante said.
A large proportion of waste that doesn't make it to the landfill and instead enters water systems are 'single-use foodware,' says Chelsea Rochman, associate professor at U of T and director of Rochman Lab. Rochman, who studies plastics that end up in Lake Ontario, found that a quarter of litter in the lake comes from cups, bottles, fast-food packaging, straws and the like.
As part of her research, Rochman also works with restaurants to transition take-out orders away from single use and toward reusables. Implementing reusables in an open system where people either bring their own containers or use reusables to be returned, has proven difficult. But with closed-loop systems, like stadiums, implementing reusable foodware systems is more plausible.
With the FIFA World Cup taking place in less than a year, host cities Vancouver and Toronto are working hard to accommodate both the incoming national teams and their fans with new infrastructure. But a conservation group hopes to reduce waste.
'With an event, the people are there. They usually throw the material away on site, and they do produce a lot of waste,' Rochman said. 'There is a huge opportunity to make a change, because people will return [their reusable dishes]. They're not leaving with their foodware.'
BC Place, one of two Canadian stadiums hosting World Cup matches, introduced reusable cups last year, as part of a pilot program in collaboration with ShareWares. Limited to premier suits and some other segmented areas, the program replaced around 20,000 single-use cups over a six month period. Return rates were only around 70 per cent in the pilot project, so a stadium-wide expansion would require more widespread, highly-visible bins and more education for attendees. But these fixes have produced better return rates at other events like Pride Toronto, said Emily Alfred, waste campaigner for Toronto Environment Alliance.
'[Pride Toronto] lost about 30 per cent of their cups in the first year. They made some changes, and they only lost 15 per cent in the second year,' Alfred said. 'And they realized, okay, we need to make it clear that these aren't souvenirs. … They changed how they gave out the cups and how they took them back, and they cut their loss rate in half.'
Alfred said with the right policies, World Cup 2026 could be remembered for its zero-waste legacy. Requiring that stadiums and event spaces provide access to water-refill stations and allow people to bring empty bottles will reduce waste from single-use water bottles. And enforcing reusable foodware in spaces where people dine-in, which includes stadiums, would round out the zero-waste project.
'If they can do it at FIFA [WC],' Alfred asked, 'why couldn't we have this in every stadium all the time? Why couldn't we have it in every movie theatre? Every McDonald's could have reusable dishes.'
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