Will Seattle’s Climate Pledge Arena Make Good on Its Promise?

SEATTLE – Fans of the Seattle Kraken, who ranks 32nd this season. There were new players on the ice to cheer, new spots to find, and new concession stands to look for.

Their biggest discovery, however, seemed to be the 1,800-square-foot green wall that describes the mission of the Climate Pledge Arena, the Kraken’s new home, which opened in time for the game. Hundreds of fans stopped to take selfies in front of the thousands of plants growing in the vertical bed made from recycled plastic bottles.

Prior to the game, Jennifer and Shane Pisani were among those who stopped to look at the green and screens showing images of solar panels, wind turbines and a statement: “The World’s First Net Zero Carbon Arena.”

Long-time hockey fans, the Pisanis were happy to have a team in town to cheer on. They were also pleased that the Kraken represented more than just wins and losses.

“It speaks for what the owners and the team want to say to the community,” said Shane Pisani. “I’m looking forward to sitting in a state-of-the-art arena.”

The Climate Pledge Arena is indeed state-of-the-art. It includes the latest in LED display boards, takeaway food stalls, and ticketless technology. But the $ 1.2 billion arena operators are also trying to set a new standard for green building by reducing and offsetting all of the planet warming emissions that they, their suppliers, and even their fans produce.

Your mission is expensive, time consuming, and risky and has never been tried before at a sports facility. The calculation of emissions is complex and imprecise and exposes the arena operator to the charge of “greenwashing” – with misleading information about the environmental properties of the building.

Tim Leiweke, executive director of Oak View Group, which owns 51 percent of the building, admitted that the return on investment was not apparent and that a lot of work had to be done to confirm that the building was achieving its goals. But he expects the efforts to pay off over time and the arena to provide a blueprint for others in the industry.

“Today there is still nothing that economically rewards us for becoming CO2-neutral,” said Leiweke. “I think our fans and sponsors will respect us and the rewards will come, but you have to lead and take your chances first.”

A growing number of sports facilities have received LEED certification from the US Green Building Council, but this designation, which stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, primarily recognizes environmentally friendly infrastructure, not necessarily how a building works. By trying to become net zero carbon and promising to do so transparently, the Climate Pledge Arena could serve as a new model. In 2020, commercial buildings accounted for 18 percent of US energy consumption.

“People have used LEED over the years to run them, but that only gets you so far,” said Scott Jenkins, co-founder of the Green Sports Alliance. “We urgently need to act and business as usual will not cut it. The challenge is how do we get others to follow them? “

Leiweke and the Kraken’s main owner, David Bonderman, who with his partners own the other 49 percent of the building, haven’t started building the greenest arena in the country. Their biggest challenge was to upgrade an arena built for the 1962 World’s Fair with a roof and windows that are landmarks along with the nearby Space Needle and monorail to downtown.

After the groundbreaking in December 2018, the 44 million pound steel roof was perched on 72 stilts so that the entire arena below could be gutted. Air conditioners, solar panels, and other machines that usually sit on the roof have been placed elsewhere on the property. A cistern was built to divert 15,000 gallons of rainwater from the roof, which is then distributed by electric zambonis to reappear the ice.

The project received high marks from environmentalists for maintaining an existing structure in a neighborhood with good public transport connections.

The renovation got more complicated last spring when Amazon bought the naming rights to the building and spent an estimated $ 300-400 million on the privilege. But instead of decorating the arena with its logo, as most companies do, Amazon named the building after one of its most ambitious initiatives, the Climate Pledge.

The company made the pledge in 2019, pledging to achieve zero net carbon emissions by 2040, a decade ahead of the targets set in the 2015 Paris Agreement. Colgate-Palmolive, Siemens and Unilever are among the 200 companies that have signed up since then.

To make sure it went the way, Amazon worked with builders to reduce the arena’s emissions and reflected the effort in its own offices and facilities. “We are trying to raise awareness of the climate crisis and we are trying to raise awareness of the existing solutions,” said Kara Hurst, Amazon’s vice president for global sustainability.

The new mandate turned the project on its head. Leiweke hired Jason McLennan, an architect and environmentalist who founded the International Living Future Institute, which has developed a certification program for sustainable buildings that goes well beyond LEED requirements.

To achieve these goals, the building could not use fossil fuels. Orders for dehumidifiers, pizza ovens and even the machines for drying player gloves had to be canceled because they ran on natural gas. Electrical replacement had to be found.

Next, the electricity that powers the building had to come from renewable sources. Solar panels were placed in an atrium in the arena, in a nearby parking lot, and in the team’s practice facility north of Seattle. More electricity was drawn from a solar and wind farm in Washington, which also supplies electricity to Amazon’s headquarters near the arena.

The arena tries to get 97 percent of its landfill waste through composting, recycling, and using biodegradable cutlery; Single-use plastic will be eliminated by 2024. On the opening evening, the fans were served beer in recyclable aluminum cups. The Leiweke team is working with Pepsi and other companies to eliminate plastic packaging and other packaging.

“We didn’t have any significant opposition from suppliers, but ask me again in a year,” said Rob Johnson, chief of sustainability at Kraken.

The biggest challenge is calculating the building’s emissions, as well as those of the fans traveling to the arena and any vendor that ships products. Surveys will help determine whether fans are traveling in gas or electric cars or using buses, light rail, monorail and other public transport – which they can use for free when they show their Kraken or concert tickets. Your CO2 emissions are added to the building’s balance sheet. Likewise, the emissions from charter flights that the Kraken and its guest teams operate to and from Seattle.

Tracking emissions from vendors is more difficult because their carbon footprint varies widely. Molly De Mers, a chef at Delaware North, a hospitality company that runs the hospitality business on the building, said three-quarters of the food used in the arena comes from farms and ranches within 300 miles of Seattle.

When sustainability is weighed against profit and loss, “it gets difficult there,” said De Mers. “Because of course the costs increase when you start with them.”

Shopping locally means avoiding foods like avocados from Mexico. De Mers also selects foods that can be prepared in different ways. Watermelons are served as vegan sashimi and their pods are pickled and used in salads. Carrot tops become gremolata, a spice. Plant-based burgers, which have a smaller ecological footprint than burgers with beef, are sold in the main hall.

The arena’s emissions are counted at the end of each year, and Amazon and the Oak View Group will buy renewable energy certificates to offset the carbon generated. The data will be released to hold building operators accountable, McLennan said.

“Nobody has ever done that, not even in one of the deep green buildings,” he said.

For the time being, the “Net Zero Carbon” declaration on the green wall is more desirable than real, because it will take at least a year for the auditors to count the emissions. Even then, the building will be “functionally null,” said McLennan, because “true null is almost impossible”.

This linguistic sleight of hand alarms some longtime environmentalists who fear critics might argue that if the building’s ambitious goals are not met, the project will be tantamount to commercialization without substance.

“To claim superlative achievements such as ‘carbon neutral’ or ‘net zero’ without specifying the extent of the impact being referred to or, worse still, claiming such a high performance when it is not actually achieved, is greenwashing, ”said Allen Hershkowitz, who advises the NHL and other teams and leagues on environmental issues. “It creates cynicism instead of inspiration.”

McLennan acknowledged that the building would not be certified until after its first year of operation. But he is confident that the goal will be achieved.

“This is not greenwashing,” he said. “Everyone has to look in the mirror and say, ‘We were all part of the problem’ and we have to say, ‘Okay, fair enough, but what are we doing now and what are we going to do in the future?’ That’s how I would react. “