Business View Magazine | September 2019

138 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE SEPTEMBER 2019 is sustainability. “Minnesota is a very environmentally-friendly state, overall, and it’s important to us as the building operator,” Talty asserts. “In 2017, we became LEED Gold certified for Building Design and Construction (BD+C) and we’ve just received Platinum LEED Certification on Operations and Maintenance (O+M). We are the first professional sports stadium to achieve the Platinum Certification for O+M, which says a lot about the dedication our staff has towards our sustainable efforts. “We achieved a zero-waste Super Bowl – our diversion rate was 91 percent. That’s two seasons after opening, ramping up a program that is diverting a lot of waste from the landfill. All of our food and beverage containers, everything that comes out of the kitchen is put into vessels that are compostable. We educate our fans at events to make sure they are throwing them away correctly. We do a post-sort – every trash bag that comes down, we go through it to make sure we’re getting as much diversion as we can. We donate a lot of our food waste to local area pantries. “We’ve put a lot into energy savings because, obviously, utilities are a big cost. So we spend a lot of time shutting off things we don’t need. We’re putting in smart plugs for freezers and coolers, so if we have a long break between events, we can shut those off easily and monitor their power use. We use green cleaning products and have since day one. It doesn’t mean we’re perfect and that we don’t see areas where we can grow and change, but we’re continuing to really work hard at keeping our sustainability efforts going. We’re real proud of what we’ve done and how hard we’ve worked at it. And I think that Platinum Certification speaks to that.” Talty is also proud of how hard he and the stadium’s 86 full-time, and up to 3,000 part-time employees work at customer service and the fan experience. “Being a new building, sometimes that culture takes a long time to build, but we built it quickly and we were very intentional from the start,” he states. “We’ve been rated in the top five in the NFL for fan experience, each of our three years. We have a very robust, SKOL Service program Credit: Joe Lemke/U.S. Bank Stadium Credit: Zachary Tarrant/MN Vikings Credit: Joe Lemke/Garth Brooks