The waste surrounding UK football
I am Drew, a female waste prevention officer for the Council. I want to speak about the waste generated in football, I don’t wish to divert people’s passion away from the industry because football is a sport in which I have a lot of love for and like millions of other people dedicate my time weekly to watching my team, but football is having a costly impact on our environment.
I hadn’t spared much of my time to thinking about how much waste is generated in football alone, I recently watched a documentary on Netflix called ‘Buy Now’ and they briefly touched on the waste generated in the production of football shirts. I began researching the waste generated and instantly found a stat that caught my eye. The global football industry produces more than 30 million tonnes of CO2 annually, which is producing roughly the total amount of emissions generated by Denmark.
Football is a huge contributor to the emissions created in the fashion industry, in 2021 alone Manchester United sold 1.95 million shirts and Liverpool sold 2.45 million shirts. I am unfortunately, part of this specific statistic as I am sure many others reading this are as well. How much has this one purchase of mine in 2021 impacted the environment? The waste doesn’t just mean the unnecessary packaging my item arrived in, but also the waste generated in the production and the scraps of textile that cannot be used and the emissions created during the shipping.
Most football shirts are made from polyester, which creates more than double the carbon footprint than the production of a regular cotton t-shirt. For many clubs the selling of shirts creates a vital source of revenue, and some are of a belief that reusing shirts may halt their revenue, however Brentford proved that to be false. In recent years, Brentford football club has rolled over their kit promoting reuse of their home kit for 2 years and they have done this twice. They strongly reiterated that this strategy didn’t pose a significant impact to their revenue in sales.
The amount I see on my mobile and TV about football, I am constantly watching and reading the sport news, and I have never come across Puma’s sustainability project called RE: JERSEY until I actively searched for it. This project has seen the Manchester City women’s team, Borussia Dortmund and Marseille wear shirts from recycled garments as part of the project. By 2025 Puma’s goal is to increase the overall usage of recycled polyester to 75% but understandably, they want to reach more.
Alongside the Puma Initiative, Adidas have also pledged to use recycled polyester for their items, football shirts included. Adidas had also said ‘switching to recycled materials helps us to reduce waste’ and allows them to ‘reduce’ the footprint of the products they make. These steps towards sustainability need to happen more frequently and used across a lot more brands.
How else can clubs make the sport more sustainable? In 2021, all premier league clubs were placed on a table for how green they were following the style of the Premier League table. Tottenham were top, joint with Liverpool for being the greenest Premier League club and this was considering factors such as clean energy, sustainable transport, reduction of single use plastic and waste management. In 2023, the same table was created, Tottenham was top of the table with Liverpool again. To find out more on the green table and how the Premier League clubs were judged, find the website here.
The club Forest Green Rovers has been named the “The greenest football club in the world” by FIFA. The entire club is powered by 100% green energy from the power firm Ecotricity some of which comes from their solar panels on the stadiums roof, all rainwater is collected and recycled around the stadium, and they also recycle all cooking oil into biofuel. The project to move them towards being a more sustainable club began in 2010 and the project decreased the amount of waste produced at the stadium in the 2017/2018 season by 14.7%.
Further information I found was the FA’s sustainability strategy to 2028 that had stated Wembley Stadium convert 30% of their waste into energy and recycle 70% of their waste. Without significant action, 25% of Premier League stadiums are at risk of annual flooding by 2050 due to the rising sea levels because of climate change.
Though football has a detrimental impact on the environment and the pace in which climate change is increasing; with the expansion of the European games potentially creating 2 billion air miles across the 24/25 season. The air miles will be equal to 500,000 tonnes of greenhouse gases being emitted due to travel from teams and fans across Europe.
The ways in which some clubs have moved towards a more sustainable way of living throughout their stadiums is something all clubs need to adopt whether they are Premier League level or league two and for the whole process to work fans also need to be on board with the changing processes.
