Greening MLSE

 
Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment is committed to being a responsible corporate citizen and leader in the community.  To this end, it has created a committee dedicated to reducing the company and its venues' environmental footprint.

MLSE has identified three areas where it can most affect its impact on the environment: Energy, Waste and Water. By making changes to the way it deals with all of the above, including utilizing deep-lake cooling, eco-friendly cleaning supplies, recycled paper products, introducing tri-sorters (recycling and organic waste management), and reverse-osmosis filtration for the ice and engaging staff members to ensure the entire company is committed to the efforts, MLSE is making great strides in reducing its footprint.


Energy
Energy is the largest component of MLSE's footprint. It is a required commodity, but we do not take its management lightly. We endeavour to minimize our environmental impact through:

• Deep-lake water cooling which eliminates the need for air conditioning compressors
• Using steam produced centrally instead of using many boilers
• Lighting controls on office floors to reduce light levels
• Overnight temperature set back
• Variable speed drives on pumps and fans
• Updating fridges to Energy Star
• Aggressive plans to upgrade lighting throughout the venue and office tower
• Proactive internal program aimed at reducing electricity usage and plug load in office tower

Waste
Over a one year period, Air Canada Centre holds on average 180 ticketed events with 2.75 million attendees coming through the building. This amount of traffic combined with the amenities of a sports and entertainment facility, produces a large volume of waste.  MLSE is cognizant of its waste and in 2009 alone will be diverting over 500 metric tonnes of organic material from landfills to farms where it is converted into clean soil. We are also recycling 375 metric tonnes of material per year. Some of our successes are:

• Using tri-sorters that separates organics and recyclables from the waste stream
• Using post-consumer recycled paper products
• Using environmentally friendly building materials and furniture, including sale or donation of old furniture instead of sending to landfills
• Donating unused food to Second Harvest
• Reduction of packaging and conversion from cardboard box delivery to reusable plastic containers
• Conversion of all organics to create soil
• Collection of fryer oil and conversion to biofuel
• Plans to move to organic packaging materials

Water
MLSE is always looking at ways to reduce water usage and to ensure our business does not contaminate our water system. Some of the ways we have done this are:

• Utilizing environmentally friendly cleaning supplies and chemicals
• Installing faucet sensors in our washrooms
• Installing aerators on taps
• Filtering the water that makes our ice through reverse osmosis, instead of treating it chemically
• Treating the water in our ice making plant with ""anode technology"" instead of with chemicals