I can't tell if this is the most appropriate sponsorship ever, or the most inappropriate, but either way I would love to see the wording of the contract that made the "Waste Management Phoenix Open" come to pass.  I mean, as a "sport," (it's really a hobby--but that's an argument is for another day) golf is decidedly shitty, but not to this literal an extreme.


And I can't figure out the 'direction' of this sponsorship.  In other words, does the "Waste Management" community have a ton of funny money lying around that they try desperately to sell their sponsorship to, a la Big Tobacco?  Or are golf tournaments becoming unpopular enough as to start eliciting sponsorship bids from ANYONE.  And i mean anyone, cause you can only march into your boss's office with so much pride to announce, "I got the poop and pee business! We are rolling in Waste Management moola!"

You also have to consider the irony of a Waste Management sponsored golf tournament.  Ironic because golf courses are up there with the most ecologically harmful businesses in the country. First, they have to carve out large expanses of native wildlife in order to make room for the vast manicured stretches of flat greenery.  Then, in order to keep the grass green and the ball bouncing consistently, that surface has to be constantly treated with not only water, but pesticides and fertilizers.  Often those tricky corrosive compounds inconveniently make their way into the local water supply.  In deserts like Las Vegas (which has over 60 courses!), maintaining the grass on a golf course for one 18-hole round of golf requires 2,507 gallons of water. Per golfer! That's a pretty shitty use of a natural resources, pun intended.

Also, this event is happening in Arizona, so you have to at least consider the possibility that 'Waste Management' is actually be a euphemism for an event focused on deporting all the brown people without papers in Phoenix.  I bet you Chi-Chi Rodríguez knows what I'm talking about.

But then, in researching this piece (yes, I do research before spouting off about some things), I ran into the Rosetta Stone of this problem.  Something to make all these disparate organizations working together make sense.  In the article I cited above, speaking on water conservation in desert regions (specifically Vegas, but I'll bet my briefs this applies to Phoenix as well):

"As recently as 1996, Angel Park was using 644 million gallons of purified drinking water a year on its fairways and greens--enough water for a town of 12,000 people. Today, because of new water management techniques, and because Angel Park has been re-landscaped to give it more of a desert feel, the course is using only 376 million gallons of water a year--a 40% cut.

And all the water Angel Park uses comes right from a wastewater treatment plant--it's re-use water, not drinking water from Lake Mead.

So while all the golf courses in the desert are hardly an example of "sustainability," in the big picture, in water use terms, a golf course that uses 1 million gallons a day of purified sewage instead of 2 million gallons a day of drinking water represents a huge leap."