Alex Brasher, Sr. Manager Facility Operations & Sustainability, St. Louis CITY SC
Member since August 2026
Description of your work in green building:
I oversee much of the day-to-day goings-on at Energizer Park, our 30+ acre professional sports campus in Downtown West, specifically including our sustainability initiatives. Our club was founded with sustainability in mind, and I’m very privileged to have been given a broad mandate and support from our leadership to organize and execute a multifaceted program to ensure we are national leaders in sustainability in our industry. Energizer Park hosts hundreds of employees daily, as well as about 500,000 guests annually across our 40 or so soccer matches and another 200+ private and public events. Even though we are a very active facility, cleanliness, conservation, waste reduction, and resource efficiency are at the forefront of everything we do. The club has an internal slogan ‘To be an exceptional club and an exceptional neighbor’ and we strive to live that out every day, especially within the operations department, whose actions can often have a tangible impact on the neighborhood around us, for better or for worse.
Recent Green Building recognition:
I’m very proud to have helped the stadium component of our campus achieve LEED Gold certification in Operations & Maintenance in April 2025. Professional sports teams are all over the board when it comes to sustainability, and while there are a few who demonstrate true leadership in the field, there really is no roadmap for sustainability in our industry. As a young organization with a small but tight-knit operations team, it was an incredible feeling to craft this program from the beginning and to see all our hard work verified and validated with the certification.
Sustainability passion:
Early on we chose to tackle waste as a cornerstone of our program and decided to eliminate single-use plastics from our facilities. Everything we serve to our guests at the stadium is either entirely compostable or entirely aluminum and thus infinitely recyclable. And we hand sort all our waste in the back of house. I meticulously track our waste streams on a matchday and 365-day basis and having now compiled 4 years of data, it’s amazing to see how much we’ve been able to divert away from the landfill. Since October 2023, we’ve hosted zero waste (>90% diversion rate) MLS matches and we are hovering just under 90% across every day of the year. Over time, we’ve tightened our relationships with many of our partners and vendors to make sure we know exactly where our materials are going when they leave the building. With the help of our hand sorting process, we send over 100 tons of organic waste to St. Louis Composting annually. Over 30 tons of aluminum BACK to PepsiCo to recraft into cans and bottles. And another 70 tons of mixed recycling, food donations, e-waste, furniture, wood, grass clippings and more – all either recycled or reused.
In addition to the waste, I can’t get enough of our all-native plantings, which span our entire campus. It’s an oasis in the middle of the city. If I could move my desk into our landscaping, I would.
Most meaningful experience with MGGBC:
Much of the success of our program has been due to the relationships we’ve been able to forge with our partners and team members. I’m a new member of the Council, but to have MGGBC and similar organizations as resources to meet with, share and learn from colleagues and compatriots in sustainability is hugely advantageous.
What will most impact the future of green building:
The integrity of our policymakers and the judgement of we the people who vote them into office.
The Future Can’t Wait! What’s one action that individuals or organizations in your industry can take in the next five years to advance greener buildings?
Ongoing and improved engagement on our part with our fans, but also being collaborators around our community and with our colleagues in sports around the country. In professional sports, we have a unique and powerful platform to inform and educate our fans and impact their behavior. We’ve tried to lead by example and offer open and honest engagement with all our stakeholders about our intentions and performance in sustainability. By showing off our program and allowing our peers to hear directly from the people who are working on it every day, we can demonstrate that anyone or any organization can achieve similar results.
Favorite LEED (or sustainability) Project:
We’re blessed in St. Louis to have too many to name, so I’ll throw out maybe a sleeper hit- Knight Hall at WashU.
Favorite place in the St. Louis region or Missouri Gateway GBC territory:
Maybe slightly far-flung, but the St. Francois Mountains are always somewhere in the back of my mind.
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