UT and Eastman Chemical Company teamed up in 1993 to create the nation’s largest stadium recycling program, with the target being the hundreds of thousands of plastic cups tossed away by fans at UT football and basketball programs. Special recycling containers were placed first in and around Neyland Stadium and then in other athletic venues on campus. Statistics from the 1993–94 campaign showed one million cups sold and four hundred thousand recycled, resulting in 13 tons of recycled material. In 1994 Eastman introduced a new, 100 percent recyclable cup for use in the stadium. The new cup, constructed from polyethylene terephthalate (PET) and produced by the SOLO Cup Company, featured the UT logo, the UT Knoxville Bicentennial Logo, and the Good Sports Always Recycle slogan.
Recycling on game days was expanded significantly to collection of other trash in 2008 as part of the Making Orange Green effort, and in 2012 the institution began competing in the national Game Day Recycling Challenge. In 2014, with stepped-up game-day recycling efforts, UT recycled more than any other school in the competition throughout the football season and came in second (to Clemson) in the single-game competition, recycling more than forty-seven thousand pounds of materials at Neyland Stadium in the final home game.