More than 92% of waste from Phoenix Super Bowl events was diverted from landfills, leading one city official to call it a “huge, historic win.”

After final sorting and weighing, the 2023 Super Bowl events hosted in downtown Phoenix surpassed a previous Super Bowl’s diversion rate of 91% “to become the greenest Super Bowl in history,” a city release stated.

The final diversion rate of city-collected trash from downtown Super Bowl events was 92.6%, qualifying it as a zero-waste event, according to officials.

“We see this as a huge, historic win,” said Lorizelda Stoeller, deputy public works director and chair of the Super Bowl Steering Committee Green Initiatives group.

“This took a lot of planning ahead of time to educate the public on separating trash from recyclables. It also took a lot of hard work from staff, volunteers and contractors who helped sort through collected garbage to ensure we weren’t landfilling any plastics or other materials that could instead be recycled.” 

Eighty-one tons of material were recycled from this year’s events, said officials, who thanked Downtown Phoenix, Inc., Keep Phoenix Beautiful and Volunteer PHX.

There were 51 volunteer Zero Waste Ambassadors, who guided visitors to put trash, recyclables and food waste into separate receptacles throughout the downtown area. 

The last time Arizona hosted the Super Bowl in 2015, Phoenix set a goal to divert 80% of waste from the landfill. In the end, the final diversion rate achieved that year was 73%. 

Since then, Phoenix “has added more robust resources and technology at the compost facility​. Public Works was able to process nearly 12 tons of food waste from the 2023 Super Bowl Experience – more than 11% of everything that was thrown away,” the release stated.

“We couldn’t have reached our goal without the new machinery that separates food packaging from food waste,” Eduardo Rodriguez, deputy public works director, said.

“Because of it, we were able to keep all that organic material out of the landfill. Soon it will become clean compost that will help beautify parks and other areas across the city.”