American Football and Sustainability Shock
My experience with the “Culture of Sustainability” in the USA
At first, I thought it was going to be absolute trash. Literally.
But against all my expectations, it would be one of the best days of my life.
Summer School in the USA
It was already the last day of my 4-week Summer School Program in the USA on the topic “A Culture of Sustainability”. With a Fulbright scholarship and 29 fellow German students, I visited the biggest university in the US-State North Carolina, with around 40,000 students.
I was really looking forward to attending the first football game of the new season at my host university, NC State University. I've never been to an American Football game before – not even some similar sports event. So, I was incredibly excited to see what would await me there.
Surprise!
Well, I haven't even revealed the twist in the whole story of my personal highlight in the USA – and actually my only real foreign experience there. But beware, it sounds like I'm joking. However, my “proof pictures” can testify to this unusual story.
So, as I already mentioned, we German students were supposed to attend the first football game of the season of the NC State football team on our last day in the USA. BUT. The whole thing had a big catch. We weren't in fact there to watch the football game. No!?
Instead, we were supposed to stand at so-called “recycling stations”, so basically just four large trash cans standing next to each other at certain locations in the stadium. But that wasn’t actually the problem, because the embarrassing part was, that we had the job to explain to the Americans how to separate their waste properly. Are you kidding me? For real? Yes, that's exactly how we felt.
It was a very strange feeling and really the most uncomfortable situation I could imagine in this context. We all felt incredibly disappointed and honestly just fooled when all this was revealed to us just a few hours before the football game. At this point, no one of us really wanted to even go to the match anymore because we didn’t want to stand at the trash cans in the heat and not be able to watch the football game.
But things turned out quite differently. We were all so captivated by the incredible atmosphere and the cool shows in the stadium that we didn't even care anymore about our actual job there. I was just so hyped, super happy, and grateful to be in this place at this time from the beginning on, where several airplanes flew over the stadium in a spectacular show and the NC State Marching Band played several songs on the huge football field.
It turned out that we were able to watch almost the entire American Football Game because, to be honest, we didn't really care that much about the trash that evening.
Even though it shouldn't have been like this, of course. After all, we had come to the USA to learn about sustainability 😉
My shock about the American “trash culture”
Although probably no one who hasn't been there will really believe it, I have to say that being a “recycling guard”, or whatever I should call my position, was actually an enriching experience.
I was basically forced to observe the people of a foreign culture, and in this way able to learn quite a lot about them as well as the extreme differences in this so to speak tiny section of the culture in this situation. Of course, mainly in relation to the value that people place on recycling and thus on protecting the environment and striving for a sustainable future.
That evening, we experienced almost all kinds of different behaviors when it came to separating trash:
- people completely ignoring us
- throwing the trash into a random can
- asking us with eye contact or words where which waste belongs
- very pleasant small talk
- longer conversations
- aggressiveness and deliberate incorrect waste separation
From my German perspective, I had actually expected that separating trash correctly would work relatively well because this seemed like one of the most normal things to do – but it wasn’t. I had simply approached the whole thing with completely false expectations and assumed my own normality, in which waste separation was the most natural thing that I had learned since childhood, just like everyone around me. I also talked about this culture shock with the others in my German Fulbright group, and most of them were really shocked too.
But we quickly realized that we simply couldn't apply the same standards here as in Germany. The whole system of waste separation had only recently been introduced on campus and – as with everything – society needs time to get used to such new ways of doing things. However, since culture is dynamic and constantly changing, and I also did have positive experiences with the waste separation campaign in the stadium, I am confident that the "Culture of Sustainability" will gradually improve here.
And who knows, if I ever go back and watch another football game at NC State - which I've been dreaming of ever since – maybe separating trash will have become the norm.
My Learnings
Foreign sense of belonging
Apart from this experience, nothing really ever felt foreign to me during my entire time in the USA. And that's exactly what I found strange because I had somehow expected at least some foreignness after my other experiences abroad. Although everything here was so completely different from university in Germany or what I had experienced during my semester abroad in Spain.
I felt like one of the students at NC State University, as if I had always been part of them somehow, and that seemed really strange to me, and I thought a lot about how this could be.
The Southerners
I believe that what played a big role in me not feeling foreign, was the openness and stereotypically friendly nature of the Southerners – to which North Carolina belongs. This made me feel instantly and always welcome and accepted. Even if the small talk may seem superficial to some, I really liked it and I was happy every time someone I didn't know spoke to me on campus, for example.
In general, the conversations seemed much more relaxed and open to me. This definitely left a deep impression on me, and I immediately felt at home in this foreign culture, which never really seemed unfamiliar to me apart from a few moments.
No matter where you are in the world
Understanding people is always keyEven the football game and my work on the trash recycling cans would never have been such a wonderful and memorable experience if I hadn't understood the people and their language.
And despite the cultural differences, the USA felt like home after the football game at the latest.
Last but not least, I can now finally say that it was only through my experience of foreignness at the football game, that I really became aware of the “Culture of Sustainability” in the USA.