How the Florida Panthers modernized their recycling to win off the ice
By Carlton Gillespie
June 10, 2026 at 6:00 AM EDT
One might expect a tour of Amerant Bank Arena, home of the Florida Panthers, to begin down on the ice, or perhaps by display cases with photos and memorabilia from the team’s two Stanley Cup winning seasons. But when your guide is Mike Prairie, you start with the trash cans.
“ In almost every location in this building where you see a waste bin, it will be paired with a recycling bin. Every time someone's going to throw something away, we want them to have at least the option here to recycle it,” he said.
Prairie is the team’s Senior Director of Sustainability & Business Optimization. He’s spearheaded the effort to change the way the Panthers throw away their trash.
“ We were really busy coming out of COVID. The team was doing very well. And so the more people you have, the more waste the building produces,” he said. “We were having challenges, so how do we look at every step in the waste process and figure out how to best solve for it?”
Each game, those recycling bins are emptied multiple times and hand separated before being recycled. It may sound like a tedious process, but the Panthers have seen significant return on their investment into modernizing their waste disposal practices. This past season the team diverted 217,000 pounds of trash from ending up in landfills.
A snapshot of successes from the Florida Panthers recycling efforts (1664x936, AR: 1.7777777777777777)
Prairie worked backwards, starting at the loading bay where the team’s trash left the building. Sitting there is a single 10-ton trash compactor that handled everything the team threw out. Once the compactor was full it was picked up by a waste disposal company — for a fee.
“ It doesn't matter how much weight is in there, whether it's an ounce or 10 tons, it's X amount in fees. If you have 1,000 pickups in a year times 1,000 bucks, that's what it's costing us,” he said.
READ MORE: The future of Broward's trash will be put to a vote
Prairie lobbied for a second compactor just for recyclables– glass, aluminum and cardboard — and began a recycling program in the arena. Separating the waste from the recycling resulted in the compactors being picked up less frequently, but one item was still giving Prairie fits.
“ If you don't know much about cardboard, it's very spongy and light, and when you put it in a compactor it doesn't weigh much, but it takes up a lot of space because it doesn't compact. So, it takes up a lot of space in those compactors,” he said.
Cardboard makes its way into the area in food packaging or merchandise shipments which only happen on what Prairie calls “dark days” or times when there are no games or concerts. That makes it easy to control how it's disposed of, but Prairie needed a way to keep it from taking up space in a compactor.
He purchased a cardboard baler, which compresses cardboard into bound rectangular prisms. Baled cardboard is stored in a shipping container in the parking lot of Amerant Bank Arena, and once there is enough stored it is hauled away. In addition to saving money by reducing the number of times the compactor gets picked up, the Panthers get paid a rebate for the baled cardboard.
To date, the team has netted tens of thousands of dollars in savings and rebates, more than the cost of the new baler and compactor, and begun to reinvest the money into the community. The team used the money made from rebates to plant a butterfly reading garden at Rock Island Elementary School.
Prairie says his work is far from over. He’s working to expand the pilot composting program that began in November. To date, the team has composted around 7,000 pounds of food waste. The team also donated more than 19,000 meals this past season from their leftover food. Leaning on the goodwill from a successful overhaul of the team’s waste disposal system, Prairie has his sights set on renewable energy in the future.
“ The next project that's gonna take more trust because it costs more, but listen, we're gonna replicate this with solar,” he said. “How do we wrap this building with a solar wrap?”
“ In almost every location in this building where you see a waste bin, it will be paired with a recycling bin. Every time someone's going to throw something away, we want them to have at least the option here to recycle it,” he said.
Prairie is the team’s Senior Director of Sustainability & Business Optimization. He’s spearheaded the effort to change the way the Panthers throw away their trash.
“ We were really busy coming out of COVID. The team was doing very well. And so the more people you have, the more waste the building produces,” he said. “We were having challenges, so how do we look at every step in the waste process and figure out how to best solve for it?”
Each game, those recycling bins are emptied multiple times and hand separated before being recycled. It may sound like a tedious process, but the Panthers have seen significant return on their investment into modernizing their waste disposal practices. This past season the team diverted 217,000 pounds of trash from ending up in landfills.
A snapshot of successes from the Florida Panthers recycling efforts (1664x936, AR: 1.7777777777777777)
Prairie worked backwards, starting at the loading bay where the team’s trash left the building. Sitting there is a single 10-ton trash compactor that handled everything the team threw out. Once the compactor was full it was picked up by a waste disposal company — for a fee.
“ It doesn't matter how much weight is in there, whether it's an ounce or 10 tons, it's X amount in fees. If you have 1,000 pickups in a year times 1,000 bucks, that's what it's costing us,” he said.
READ MORE: The future of Broward's trash will be put to a vote
Prairie lobbied for a second compactor just for recyclables– glass, aluminum and cardboard — and began a recycling program in the arena. Separating the waste from the recycling resulted in the compactors being picked up less frequently, but one item was still giving Prairie fits.
“ If you don't know much about cardboard, it's very spongy and light, and when you put it in a compactor it doesn't weigh much, but it takes up a lot of space because it doesn't compact. So, it takes up a lot of space in those compactors,” he said.
Cardboard makes its way into the area in food packaging or merchandise shipments which only happen on what Prairie calls “dark days” or times when there are no games or concerts. That makes it easy to control how it's disposed of, but Prairie needed a way to keep it from taking up space in a compactor.
He purchased a cardboard baler, which compresses cardboard into bound rectangular prisms. Baled cardboard is stored in a shipping container in the parking lot of Amerant Bank Arena, and once there is enough stored it is hauled away. In addition to saving money by reducing the number of times the compactor gets picked up, the Panthers get paid a rebate for the baled cardboard.
To date, the team has netted tens of thousands of dollars in savings and rebates, more than the cost of the new baler and compactor, and begun to reinvest the money into the community. The team used the money made from rebates to plant a butterfly reading garden at Rock Island Elementary School.
Prairie says his work is far from over. He’s working to expand the pilot composting program that began in November. To date, the team has composted around 7,000 pounds of food waste. The team also donated more than 19,000 meals this past season from their leftover food. Leaning on the goodwill from a successful overhaul of the team’s waste disposal system, Prairie has his sights set on renewable energy in the future.
“ The next project that's gonna take more trust because it costs more, but listen, we're gonna replicate this with solar,” he said. “How do we wrap this building with a solar wrap?”