Team USA might be considered an underdog in the FIFA World Cup that starts Friday in South Africa, but their jerseys make them number one in my book. When they play England on Saturday, they'll be sporting high-performance kits made from recycled plastic bottles. For this World Cup, green is the goal.
Clothing companies have been making athletic garb, including fleece, out of recycled bottles for years now, but what's different here is what happens after the plastic is melted and turned into thread. According to Nike, which produced the jerseys for its nine national teams, the stretchy double-knit fabric is 15 percent lighter than other football jerseys it has constructed. Each jersey has ventilation on the sides from hundreds of tiny laser-cut holes to keep players drier while they pursue the ball. All in all, about 13 million bottles were diverted from landfills to make the uniforms. The other teams with these green duds are Australia, Brazil, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Portugal, Serbia, Slovenia, and South Korea.
Recycling has been a recurring theme for the World Cup. Last year Coca-Cola and FIFA worked with the South African department of education on a recycling campaign in South Africa. With free tickets to a match on the line for the most PET bottles, students collectively gathered nearly 68,000 of them in a matter of weeks. Maybe FIFA will expand this for 2014 and get school kids around the world to recycle, compost, conserve resources and even eat their veggies.
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Just in time for the World Cup, Africa's first high-speed rail line had an initial run on Tuesday in South Africa. For now, the "Gautrain" goes between the financial center in Sandton and the international airport about 13 miles away. By next year construction is expected to extend the train to Pretoria and Johannesburg. Perhaps more impressive to me is a new bus rapid transit system in Johannesburg that's intended to help football fans get around.
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While recycled plastic jerseys and faster public transportation are steps in the right direction, the World Cup in South Africa is still expected to emit eight times the carbon as the 2006 tournament in Germany. Boooo! In true competitive football style, 2014 World Cup host Brazil is saying that it plans to have the most ecological football tournament ever. We'll see. At the very least, Brazil has the continuing destruction of the rainforests to answer for. When it comes to football and the environment, as great as those jerseys look, I have my yellow card at the ready.
Photo: Team USA forward Clint Dempsey in a recycled plastic jersey. Yeah. Recycled. You got a problem with that? Credit: Nike.
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