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NASCAR speeds transition to green

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When NASCAR raced onto the track at Fontana’s Auto Club Speedway on Sunday, it did so accompanied by the distinct whiff of environmentalism. To help neutralize the carbon-dioxide emissions generated from the race, the track’s owners will plant 100 trees around the community as part of the NASCAR Green Clean Air program. To reduce waste, Coca-Cola set up a portable processing center capable of recycling 1,000 containers per minute, adding to the 6 million containers the company will recycle at NASCAR events this year; Sprint was handing out postage-paid envelopes for fans to recycle their unwanted cellphones when they got home.

But the greening didn’t end there. Behind the scenes in the pits, Goodyear was reclaiming spent tires and Safety-Kleen was recapturing used motor oil, part of which will be recycled into new lubricants.

With dozens of race cars pushing 200-mph speeds for hundreds of miles at a time, NASCAR and green are admittedly “counterintuitive,” said Mike Lynch, managing director of green innovation for NASCAR, which is three years into a mission to make the biggest environmental impact in sports. The country’s largest sanctioning body for stock car racing oversees 1,500 races at more than 100 tracks in 39 U.S. states and Canada annually.

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“The country is going in a green direction, both from a corporate standpoint and in terms of general consciousness,” said Lynch. “We felt the NASCAR environment could shine an enormous amount of visibility on companies’ technologies and solutions,” specifically around the areas of conservation, green job creation and U.S. energy independence.

It’s an ambitious endeavor to go green without any compromises to the racing experience -- one that requires engagement from the many parties that join together in the name of American stock car racing, from the facilities that host the events and the businesses that support them, to the fans in the stands and the teams that put the cars on the track.

Until four years ago, Roush Fenway Racing cut up its old cars and put them in the dumpster, said Ian Prince, chief sustainability officer for the Concord, N.C., race shop. Last year, the shop instead recycled 21,000 pounds of plastic and 165,000 pounds of steel and aluminum, diverting them from the landfill. It also instituted a no-idling campaign on its 25-acre campus to discourage delivery people from leaving their trucks running, and it purchased a dozen bicycles for employees to run errands without turning on their cars. It now uses soy-based degreasers to clean up and water-based, non-VOC paints on its cars.

“Our engineers are talking about how do things cleaner, better, lighter, faster,” said Prince, whose shop started deploying green strategies one year before NASCAR Green was instituted.

“The benefit that NASCAR has is they have a wonderful platform with a huge audience to convey this message,” said Prince. “There’s no way NASCAR or Roush or you or anybody singlehandedly has a direct impact, but if people start to see it at the track, and at the shops, then it’s OK. This is real. Maybe I should be recycling this Coke bottle and buying this next-gen oil. It’s an exposure tool. It’s doing the right thing for the right reason.”

And it seems to be paying off.

Leading up to the launch of NASCAR Green on Earth Day 2009, NASCAR surveyed many of its 65 million fans to poll their environmental views. “We thought maybe folks who are into motor sports aren’t as green as average,” Lynch said, “but the data said fans and non-fans were similar in terms of green attitudes and behaviors.”

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According to a 2011 NASCAR poll conducted with Experian Consumer Research, 91% of NASCAR fans now say they are likely to recycle items at least some of the time versus 87% for non-fans.

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