Environmental Sustainability Report
- New report enables clubs, fans, journalists and anyone in the sports ecosystem to easily find information relating to top flight English football clubs.
- Important initiative, as increased interest, coverage and action on sustainability in football can be supported by easy to access information on activities.
- The only ‘one stop shop’ for Premier League environmental sustainability information, highly credible as information sourced directly from clubs.
- Fifth year of annual benchmarking and progress tracking
9th May 2024, London: A new report released today maps environmental sustainability efforts from all 20 Premier League clubs across thirteen categories of activity. From operational areas such as energy, transport, waste, water, single use plastic, food and biodiversity, to strategic areas including commitments, policy and reporting, communications, education, procurement and sponsorship.
The report highlights trends and progress from the Premier League clubs, as well as areas where more efforts are needed, such as:
- Three clubs have their environment or sustainability efforts externally accredited
- Five clubs are signatories to UNFCCC Sports for Climate Action
- Six clubs have net zero targets
- Six clubs have onsite clean energy generation at their stadium, academy or training ground
- Seven clubs have sustainable transport policies in place
- Eight clubs have brand identities for their environmental efforts
- Nine clubs have rainwater or groundwater reuse efforts
- 15 clubs have building management systems at their stadiums to ensure efficiency of resources
- 16 clubs have 100% diversion of waste from landfill, with substantive recycling efforts
- All 20 clubs serve vegan food options on their concourses
The report shares which clubs are included in these statistics, and others, in the ‘Trends and Progress’ section. Using the hyperlinked contents page, the report enables users to search by club, to view everything one club is doing on environmental sustainability across thirteen categories. It also enables those using the report to easily see what every club is doing on one category, to get an overview of progress in that area.
The report highlights that while there is much work still to do, the progress from clubs over the past five years since Sport Positive Leagues started collating this information in 2019 has markedly improved.
Earlier this year, the Premier League announced its Environmental Sustainability Commitment, which will see each club developing a robust environmental sustainability policy, by the end of the 2024/25 season. The report shows that all twenty current clubs have some kind of sustainability policy, commitment, strategy or statement in place. Noting that with promotion/relegation, the clubs will differ at the end of the 2024/25 season.
Under this commitment, clubs must also develop a greenhouse gas emissions dataset, including scope 1, 2 and 3, by the end of the 2025/26 season. The report shows that six clubs already have this dataset and currently publish their GHG emissions, one has the dataset but it is not currently public and five more clubs have shared they are in the process of calculating or reviewing their GHG emissions.
Sport Positive Leagues has previously released this information in a league table format, with points attributed to levels of activity. For the fifth year, it was decided to release the information as a report to disseminate and amplify the clubs activities as a cohort, share trends and encourage access to key information.
Link to report: https://www.sportpositiveleagues.com/pl-2023/
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