The greenest football club in the world

Football isn’t particularly known for its progressive thinking, but Ecotricity’s collaboration with Forest Green Rovers could shift the goalposts. Welcome to the most sustainable football club in the world – probably.

Newly promoted to the Football League for the first time in the club’s history, the Green Devils, as they’re known, at Forest Green Rovers have plenty to smile about. In 2010, the club teamed up with Ecotricity, the green energy company, in what is something of a passion project for Ecotricity’s founder Dale Vince. It has since been named by world governing body FIFA as “football’s greenest club”.

Together, they are changing perceptions of what football should and could look like: from pitch to (vegan) plate.

A red card for red meat: the first meat-free football menu

“When we took red meat off the club menus, we achieved national and international coverage (and plaudits) for the move,” says Ecotricity’s PR manager Max Boon. “Now, we’re home to the first meat-free football menu. We did it for strong environmental and health reasons. We’re working to the principles of local, seasonal, fresh and organic food wherever possible.”

The club introduced a fully vegan menu in October 2015 and, in May this year, officially become the world’s first vegan football club, after its plant-based menu was awarded the Vegan Trademark. Its Q pie – a Quorn and leek pie made with soya milk bechamel – won a podium spot at the 2017 British Pie awards.

Golden goals: a world-first organic sports pitch

The club has the world’s only organic football pitch, which has ditched conventional pesticides and herbicides in favour of an all-natural approach, including the use of a Scottish seaweed solution which helps keep the grass strong and healthy.

Playing the pools: keeping the playing surface in top condition using rainwater

The pitch at The New Lawn has a first class drainage system and the club also collects all rainwater that falls on the stadium roof – which is then recycled to be used on the pitch – meaning that the club is virtually independent from the mains water system.

Pitching in: the cutting-edge ‘mow bot’

When the UK’s first electric ‘mow-bot’ arrived at the club, it put Rovers in the same league as Bayern Munich, who also care for pitch and planet using this technology. The ‘mow-bot’ uses GPS technology to automatically mow the pitch without the need for human intervention – saving up to 50 per cent of the club’s groundsman’s working week – it even sends him a text if it runs into trouble. Powered from 100 per cent green electricity from solar panels on The New Lawn stadium roof, the eco-friendly R2D2 will trim the club’s carbon footprint as well as the grass, and can be used for other sporting pitches such as rugby and cricket.

 

Source: Positive News

Photograph: © Unsplash

Become an agent of change by contributing to the development of Global Goodness

Mobile Transfer

Contact name: Global Goodness

Email: donations@globalgoodness.ca

Mobile: (514) 966 4544

Bank Transfer

SWIFT: CCDQCAMM

Branch: 815—Transit: 3019—Account: 815 30197 891267

Beneficiary Name: Global Goodness

Beneficiary address: 4543 Fabre, Montreal, QC, H2J 3V7

High-quality writing is very important to members of the Global Goodness team. But no one’s perfect, so they always use Antidote. to correct their texts.