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Now What?
The country is swept up in Green movement. When Middlebury skiing went carbon neutral in 2006, we were the first cross country ski team in the country to do so. In 2007, the Norwegian Marathon Superstar Squad, Team Xtra went carbon neutral, the Junior National Championships in 2009 are going to be the first "Green" ski championships. We'd like to think that we have had something to do with it. Our ski area remains offset and measures are being taken to decrease the amount of carbon as the school moves towards Carbon Neutrality by 2012. The question remains for us: now what? We keep going for the 2008 / 2009 season Middlebury skiing will continue its position as a leader in the Green Sports World. Look for more aggressive changes and movements to help our program.
Driving a Green Agenda.
Middlebury skiers look to veggie oil for a greener ride
Middlebury, Vt – The college dining hall will soon be a requisite stop for the Middlebury Nordic ski team before they depart for competition. It’s not necessarily for food, but rather a fuel stop to pump leftover fryer oil into the team truck.
Middlebury's green-minded Nordic team believes it is the first Division I ski team to power its transportation with vegetable oil. It’s one of several initiatives Middlebury athletes are taking to lighten their environmental footprint as they travel to competitions throughout the Northeast.
Coach Andrew Gardner says the Nordic team inherited the college-owned truck – a muscular Dodge diesel crew cab – this year from the crew team, which does not use it during the winter months. The truck carries five passengers and has enabled the Nordic team to pull an 18-foot dual axle trailer outfitted with baseboard heat, power outlets, waxing benches and plenty of space for equipment and a couple of stationery bikes for post-race cool down. Previously the skiers shoehorned their gear into minivans and did their best to wax skis in a tight space. “Now there are no holes in our preparation,” says Gardner.
Middlebury first-year student Chase Marston says the new set-up makes a big difference in the team’s ability to compete and he is glad the team can do it in an environmentally responsible way. "We've got the best waxing set-up in the eastern circuit,” says Marston. “It gives us plenty of space to store equipment and a warm place to wax. It’s really handy.”
Gardner, who serves as sustainability coordinator for the athletics department, is mindful of the environmental price tag that comes with all that all that driving and hauling during the ski season. That's why he applied for a grant from the Colorado-based Brown Foundation to have the team truck converted to burn waste vegetable oil. The conversion was done by Full Circle Automotive in Waitsfield, Vermont and is nearly invisible except for a small computer screen on the dashboard and a 40-gallon tank for vegetable oil enclosed in the back of the truck. The team can travel up to 400 miles on a fill-up, which has been more than enough to get them to and from their competitions.
Because of extremely cold winter temperatures, the truck starts and stops on regular diesel, but automatically switches over to vegetable oil as soon as the engine warms up – usually about 15 minutes, Gardner says. The computer screen tells the driver when the switch occurs. Gardner says they've been getting their oil from Full Circle Automotive, but with help from the college’s Sunday Night Group, a campus coalition of student environmental groups, the team will soon switch to oil from the college dining halls.
Gardner believes most sports by definition are energy-consuming activities and that athletes need to be aware of how they can reduce their environmental impact. "Issues around global warming and climate change I think feed into skiers concerns more significantly than, say, if you’re on a basketball court," he says. “The glaciers I’ve been to when I was training as an athlete are different now and that’s unnerving. Working in athletics you find a lot of winter-sport athletes willing to adopt sustainability issues more quickly than traditional athletes, but I hope that what we’re doing will bleed into other sports as well.”
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