At Hockey SENSE, an NHL and NHL Players' Association summit last month, influential members of the hockey community spoke out about the importance of environmental sustainability in sport.

The 250 dignitaries, educators, NHL alumni and members of the hockey community gathered in the Hall of Fame’s Great Hall to discuss the future of hockey, with a focus on promoting social equality and sustainable practises.

NHL Commissioner, Gary Bettman, said: "We're finding ourselves in a unique and challenging time throughout the world... We can use hockey as the universal language to bring the world together with an event like this. With constituents from throughout the world, we can show that hockey can represent diversity and inclusiveness, which are kind of environmental issues on their own, and tie them to using sport as a platform to raise consciousness about what we can do to make a more sustainable planet.

He added: "It's really the ability of our game, the people associated with it and the platform our athletes have to send out messages and bring people together in a world that seems ever increasingly private."

NHLPA Executive Director, Donald Fehr, said: "One of the interesting things that has happened in the last 20, 25 years, or so it seems to me, is that the level of public discourse about issues we all have to confront has become a little meaner, a little more trite, a little less substantive. And that means that the issues that we all have to deal with, wherever in the world we come from, become more difficult because you're not talking about them.

Fehr also said: "Sometimes what you can do with an event that isn't ostensibly devoted to those kinds of matters is to shine a light on what needs to be looked at, talked about, and how you can do it a little bit differently."

NHL will focus on using renewable energy and setting up recycling programmes.

Commissioner Bettman said: "We're a sport that has our very origin on frozen ponds... The accessibility of our game to young people is impacted negatively to the extent that ponds and lakes and rivers aren't freezing the way they used to. There's less access to just skating outdoors. People marvel when they come to our outdoor games. Part of that is the imaging of taking our game back to its roots."