Fresh off our recently announced 3rd Emmy nomination, I again teamed up with friend and colleague Penny Legate to produce another story for The Seattle Channel program City Stream. In addition to my work with private clients, I continue to freelance with The Seattle Channel as a cameraman and editor, doing stories mainly about sustainability, the environment and overall people and organizations engaged in positive work in our community. Though the pay isn’t great, I enjoy doing work for broadcast and seeing my work on television. This year The Seattle Channel was nominated for overall station excellence and the broad spectrum of programming is a great reflection of the character of our city, far beyond just covering boring city council meetings.
For the last 2 years Cedar Grove Composting has been one of Pangeality Production’s best clients, and when I learned that they were composting all of the food scraps and packaging at the main sports stadiums here, I thought it’d make a great story for City Stream. I was especially impressed by their partnership with Safeco and Qwest Fields, the homes of Seattle’s MLB team the Mariners and NFL team the Seahawks.
Yesterday I spent the day down at Safeco Field for the Seattle Mariner’s opening day with my client Cedar Grove Composting. Cedar Grove is taking all of the thousands of pounds of food scraps left behind at the ballpark, and instead of them going to a landfill, turning them into compost that’ll then be used among other things in the planters and landscaping around the ball park. Unfortunately not on the field which would be the ultimate application but in the flowers and trees surrounding the park which is pretty great. And not only the foodscraps and green waste, but Cedar Grove provides many of the food trays and napkins, and even corn based plastic cups and utensils at the snack bars throughout the park. And in addition to Safeco Field, Cedar Grove has similar partnerships with The Seattle Seahawks at Qwest Field, The Washington Convention Center, The University of Washington and over 2,000+ other businesses and event facilities around Puget Sound. Very impressive, a great client who I’m excited about continuing to work with and share with Seattle this leadership in large scale urban sustainability practices. At Safeco, I was actually following around 2 guys in meat and banana costumes asking Mariners fans about their own understanding of compost and how they felt about knowing the Mariners were leaders in Major League Baseball environmental practices. When you consider how many millions of people go to baseball games across America every year and the impact it could have if similar practices were implememnted at other ball parks. That would be hundreds of millions of tons of material diverted from landfills and turned into a healthy byproduct that would otherwise have been waste.