Text: Danièle Grobsheiser

Everyone in Germany has heard of Green Goal. It was a welcome added extra at the recent World Cup. The millions of football fans – some 40 million in fact– who flocked to the country’s 12 stadiums to watch the 64 World Cup football matches found that their entrance tickets included 24 hours of unlimited free travel on the local public transport system. This first in the history of sport was designed to minimise the impact of cars on air quality in the cities hosting the matches.
The organisers hoped to persuade a third of all spectators to leave their cars at home. In the end, more than half chose public transport. Mission clearly successful for this track of the Green Goal programme, which set out to establish a benchmark. Green Goal is based on a co-operation agreement between the Organising ommittee of the XVIII FIFA World Cup, the German Ministry of the Environment, the Öko Institut and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). Its aim is to boost environmental protection in a number of ways. Franck Beckenbauer, Chairman of the Organising Committee, who has played a major role in setting up Green Goal since 2003, defined four targets: to encourage spectators to use public transport rather than private cars to offset the peak in carbon dioxide (100,000 tonnes) typically generated by these huge public gatherings; to save water; to reduce energy consumption; and to reduce and manage visible waste. A range of measures was taken to meet these targets: rainwater collection, special pitch drainage systems, high-tech electrical equipment, low-energy stadium lighting, and the reduction of packaging to a strict minimum (drinks containers were recuperated using a deposit-and-return system). The 13,000 kW of extra electricity required was imported from low-pollution hydroelectric plants in Switzerland. And to top it off, the roof of the Kaiserslautern stadium was fitted with photovoltaic solar panels (capacity: 55,000 kW/year). Among the many other ecological initiatives, Total (a Green Goal partner) provided fuel for Berlin’s first two hydrogen-powered buses. The massive Green Goal campaign is set to become a best practice in the sporting world: the organisers of both the Euro 2008 Championship and the 2012 Olympics have already contacted the German Organising Committee to discuss giving their events a “green goal” too…