Big foot

Major sports events leave a massive "ecological footprint," according to British scientists who studied the environmental impact of the 2004 soccer championship in Wales. The 73,000 fans who attended the event traveled 26 million miles, collectively, to get to Cardiff's Millennium Stadium.

While there, they produced 59 tons of waste, most of it in food and glass. Then there's the amount of farmland required to produce the food consumed and even the tonnage of concrete and steel used in building the stadium. Had fans taken buses and trains rather than cars, the environmental impact could have been reduced by 24 percent, says lead researcher Andrea Collins, PhD, of the Centre for Business Relationships, a Welsh think tank. Recycling food and drink packaging could have cut it by an additional 14 percent.

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