You can still celebrate the Super Bowl without creating a lot of waste. (Image: sportschaser.com)
If you’re like most Americans, Super Bowl Sunday means lots of snacks, beers, laughs, (or depending on your team, tears). It may also be one of the easiest days of the year to slip back into bad habits of buying over-packaged and single-use items. This need not be the case! I can show you how to have a great Super Bowl party that’s even healthy, too, without the super waste and super mess.
What’s the best way to make your beer-chugging, chili-eating guests good sports with Mother Nature?
Make it effortless! That way, most of the floating jerseys in your house won’t even realize what hit ‘em. Sack ‘em from their blind spot! I’ll show you a pre-game warm up, great tailgate, trick plays, awesome defense, and extra points to make your party a touch down.
Pre-game Warm Up – Carpool
Tell your guests that you don’t want drinking and driving or your neighbors getting annoyed with too many cars parked in the street. Ask your guests to come together to save CO2 emissions and avoid any unsafe driving.
Tailgate – Get a Keg
Beer is a pretty standard part of America’s Super Bowl; the aftermath of beer cans and bottles on the other hand, is not something we should be proud of. Prevent the waste and the can pile-up by getting a keg! Besides, a keg holds 140-160 beers and can be a whole lot cheaper than buying lots of cans.
Trick Play – Local Organic Meat Chili and Healthy Snacks
Super Bowl food is associated with Costco-sized bags of chips, a plethora of unhealthy dips, and hearty meaty chili. If you’re going hard-core, you can try doing veggie chili, which is equally delicious, but that may not fly with some of the bros on your couch.
A pre-game appetizer is usually always chips and dip, so give ‘em what they want! Chips and salsa is a must, so hit ‘em where they don’t see it and supply organic salsa and gluten free chips! Here’s a link to some great organic salsas.
Looking for more delicious snacks that everyone will love and not realize how healthy they are munching? Skinnytaste.com has a slew of amazing organic snack options. Here are some links to my favorite recipes for Parmesan Kale Chips and Skinny Queso Dip:
Home-baked Parmesan kale chips are a delicious and healthy party snack alternative (Image: Skinnytaste.com)
This Skinny Queso Dip can be made at home (Image: Skinnytaste.com)
Defense — Get Rid of the Disposables
Save yourself some money and cut down on landfill waste by whipping out the silverware and china. And when you load them into the dishwasher, use an eco-friendly soap (I like Method’s Smarty Dish tabs) let the machine do the work while you kick up your feet. You’ll have a lot less to clean up and more time to watch the post-game highlights. (If you’re worried about using the dishwasher, I’ve seen research that suggests washing a full load of dishes uses less water and energy than doing them by hand.)
If you’re worried that your guests may break some plates or cups (fair assumption) get dishwasher-safe plastic dishes (They run about $10/pack.), so you can use them again and again. Solo even has a line of compostable and recycable dishes called “Bare”. You can purchase them online or in some stores.
Extra Points – Recycle Stations
The majority of your guests will likely be men — and for reasons unknown to most women — men will bet on literally anything. Football, and the Super Bowl in particular, is a testosterone-boosting event that will elevate their levels of competition beyond female recognition, so let’s give them something to compete about.
Set up recycle stations in your house for those paper napkins, cups or beer cans that might slip into your otherwise green and waste-free event. Making recycling fun by creating a point system for your guests to shoot into separate bins will not only make the men want to recycle, they will enjoy it, too!
Touchdown!
With all these tips, your guests will enjoy the game, have a great time, and not even realize they are wasting less! Being a die-hard fan of the Pittsburgh Steelers, I could care less if the Ravens or the 49ers win this Sunday, but like a true American I celebrate our unofficial national holiday. With these easy tips you can help waste less and help the environment so everyone wins…Touchdown for the Waste Watchers!
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Ms. Kelly,
This was a creatively written post and full of great information, thank you! It’s true that the best way to get people to engage in recycling and other waste-reducing practices is to make it easy. If you didn’t say it was textured soy in the chili, I bet nobody would notice! Another thing I like do when guests are over is to put a cute label on the light switch in the bathroom to make sure it’s off when no one is in there.
And thank you for the recipes – finally, the cheese gods have given us an alternative to an otherwise fattening dip!
Thanks for recipe for kale chips. I’m a big chipper myself (“A savory not a sweet”), so the idea for healthy chips sounds downright appetizing!
Congrats to the Patriots, 2015 Super Bowl champs. I’m tempted to think having a little Yankee Ingenuity on one’s side helped to win the Game!