Sustainable practices in grassroots sport: BAGS project update & survey
Be Active for Greener Sport (BAGS) is a small collaborative partnership between Opes Italia, Logos (Sedaví), Romania Humanist Association (RHA-Romania) and ENGSO.
BAGS builds on PlayGreen, a concluded Erasmus+ project where ENGSO was a partner that aimed to enhance volunteer capacities to organize green grassroots football events in their communities with the support of their respective football federations.
BAGS aims to enhance sustainable practices in grassroots sport, testing the ideas and tools of PlayGreen in various disciplines. ENGSO with their project manager, Niki Koutrou, led an expert training last February in Sedavi, Valencia for all partners explaining the bi-directional relationship between sport and the environment, and on how to use the green tool developed as part of PlayGreen to capture and reduce environmental impact of sport.
Currently, BAGS partners are planning their local green activities in their respective areas to be hosted between May and July this year. Among the sustainable solutions that are put forward, Logos will focus on actions in two sports, basketball and swimming. These actions are organised under four themes (a) broadcasting, in order to raise awareness among the local community and other sport clubs in the area about environmental sustainability in sports, for example, an information photoshoot with athletes sharing their sustainable actions.
The second strand of their environmental efforts focuses on recycling and reuse (e.g. clothing and sport equipment exchange), the third theme is sustainable education, where a series of educational workshops (i.e. sustainable nutrition and a workshop with experts from the Albuferra Natural Park) will be run to raise awareness on the impact of daily habits on the environment and sport in particular. Finally, in collaboration with Valencia Masters Alaquàs Swimming Club, they will organise two major national swimming tournaments, where they will use the Green Tool developed as part of PlayGreen to assess the foreseeable environmental impact of the event prior to hosting it, and then plan sustainable measures and solutions to make it more sustainable. With these actions, Logos aims to generate a wider impact and reach on their awareness building campaign to explain the bi-directional relationship between sport and the environment.
Opes Italia is also planning a series of sustainable actions across different regions of Italy, Calambria, Sardinia and Sicily to reach a wider range of the local population. Their actions also focus on raising awareness, developing skills and capacities to measure and reduce environmental impact and also plan sustainable grassroots events.
RHA along with the sustainable actions that they are planning to host targeting physical education teachers and children in Romania are also tasked with developing pan-European policy recommendations on environmental sustainability in grassroots sports. To this end, they have released a survey and are collecting data from sport managers, coaches, educators, volunteers and other stakeholders who work and support grassroots sports.
If you also support grassroots sport and wish your voice to be heard, the survey could be accessed at:
All these efforts from BAGS partners apart from building and enhancing the legacy of PlayGreen show that even small, cost-effective actions could be important in promoting and supporting sustainability in and through sport and bring about positive change in local communities.
