Hollywood Park Sustainability Program

About Hollywood Park Sustainability:

Since its inception, sustainability has been at the forefront for Hollywood Park. The global sports and entertainment destination is committed to a sustainable future by lessening its environmental impact through water conservation, waste diversion and energy efficiencies, with a focus on creating programs that serve Greater Los Angeles and benefit the surrounding community. Additionally, SoFi Stadium is just the second NFL venue to achieve third-party certification for ISO 20121:2012 Event Sustainability Management System, a standard designed to address the management of improved sustainability throughout the event management cycle.

Statement

SoFi Stadium and Hollywood Park are committed to sustainable operations and management practices across its 298 acres and becoming a leader in environmental, social, and economic responsibility. The landscape features 16.65 acres of total planting area with over 5,000 trees and plants purposefully selected to promote the regeneration of habitats and encourage the return of native wildlife. In 2022, SoFi Stadium was awarded the ISO 20121:2012 Event Sustainability Management System certification, becoming the second NFL venue to achieve such certification. The system is a voluntary international standard that specifies requirements, provides guidance and aims to continually improve sustainability through event management. 

Water Conservation

• Lake Park, a 6-acre lake onsite, functions as a water recycling system by collecting 70-80 percent of stormwater runoff that irrigates the surrounding parkland and landscape
• Hollywood Park utilizes approximately 26 million gallons of recycled water per year, which saves an equal amount of drinking water for the region.
• Net-zero water use has been achieved through the lake’s reclaimed water system.
• Hollywood Park is home to almost 100 percent Southern California native plant species, each purposefully selected to be water-conscious.

Waste Diversion

• SoFi Stadium averages almost 2M pounds of diverted waste material per year.
• SoFi Stadium and YouTube Theater donate their excess prepared foods to recovery agencies like Chefs to End Hunger. Chefs to End Hunger provides meals to the hungry by redistributing the excess prepared food that would normally go to waste to local charitable organizations. The venues average 17,000 meals donated per year.
• SoFi Stadium is one of a few NFL stadiums to have an Organic Refuse Conversion Alternative (ORCA) Digester onsite. An ORCA Digester is in an onsite aerobic digester that utilizes a natural biological process to efficiently break down food waste prior to it being discharged into normal plumbing infrastructure. The ORCA Digester also eliminates the need for large, often inefficient, garbage trucks to haul food waste, saving carbon emissions. The two ORCA’s at SoFi Stadium digest about 36,000 pounds of pre-consumed food waste per year, which is equivalent to that of an 18-wheel semi truck or about 25 cows.
• Through its partnership with Ball Corporation, SoFi Stadium became the first sports and entertainment venue in Los Angeles County to provide infinitely recyclable aluminum cups exclusively for draft beer, eliminating the need for plastic cups. An average of 661,000 single-use plastic cups are eliminated per year at SoFi Stadium.

Energy Efficiency

• Located less than 3 miles from the beach, Hollywood Park has an ETFE roof canopy at Hollywood Park curves to allow a continuous ocean breeze throughout the venue, naturally cooling the venue.
• The frit pattern on the ETFE roof canopy hinders direct sunlight so the ambient temperature is approximately 4 degrees cooler inside the building than outside
• YouTube Theater was designed to incorporate natural light and an open floor plan to reduce lighting needs and subsequent energy use.
• About 200 tons of oxygen is produced per year by Hollywood Park’s landscape design
• With onsite EV chargers, Hollywood Park has avoided on average 1M pounds of greenhouse gas emissions; equivalent to 6 tanker trucks’ worth of gasoline.

Programs

• SoFi Stadium and Hollywood Park’s eco-friendly crowd control at Lake Park involves a Falconer to limit the number of nuisance birds in the area. Since SoFi Stadium and Hollywood Park is directly under a number of LAX flight paths, the hawks are trained to frighten seagulls, geese, ducks and pigeons away from the 6-acre lake, helping to eliminate the possibility of a bird strike and keep the area clean.
• Hollywood Park instituted a Sustainability Employee Resource Group (ERG) to provide an open environment to educate and implement best sustainability practices across the campus and cultivate leaders in environmental, social, and economic responsibility.

*As of January 2024