Is the grass greener on the other side? a review of the Asia-Pacific sport industry’s environmental sustainability practices

In recent years, sport entities have begun to prioritise environmental sustainability (ES) initiatives in their business strategies with the aim of minimising their environmental impact and engaging stakeholders within the ES movement. There has been minimal academic consideration of the ES movement in professional sport, particularly outside of North America and Europe. The aim of the present study is to provide an overview of the type and profile of ES initiatives being undertaken and communicated to stakeholders in the Asia-Pacific region by the industry bodies. Further, the study offers a conceptual model of the global-, country-, industry- and organisational-level forces impacting these sporting organisations’ ES practices. Various communication mediums of 114 professional sport teams from seven countries—Australia, India, New Zealand, Japan, China, Taiwan and Korea—were evaluated using content analysis. The results reveal low communication of ES practices by professional sport teams in the Asia-Pacific region compared to North America. Extended findings on the existing global profile of ES engagement provide a descriptive understanding of the ES movement in the Asia-Pacific region, and contribute to the identification of possible antecedents and correlatives to be evaluated in future research.

Integrating health and sustainability in life cycle assessment

Until now health impact assessment and environmental impact assessment are two different issues, often not addressed together. Both issues have to be dealt with for sustainable building. The aim of this paper is to link healthy and sustainable housing in life cycle assessment. Two strategies are studied: clean air as a functional unity and health as a quality indicator. The strategies are illustrated with an example on the basis of Eco-Quantum, which is a Dutch whole-building assessment tool. It turns out that both strategies do not conflict with the LCA methodology. The LCA methodology has to be refined for this purpose.