As the Premier League season draws to a close, one football stadium has been crowned ‘greenest champion of them all’!
The Emirates, home to Arsenal FC, celebrates at the top of the table, ranked as the Premier League’s greenest stadium with an index score of 64.48.
It emerges as clear winner of a Bionic analysis of premier league stadiums, which ranked each one – and their surroundings – based on local air pollution levels, energy efficiency, heat usage etc.
The Emirates, with its capacity of 60,707, became home to Arsenal Football Club in 2006. In 2018, the club became the first to install large-scale battery energy storage in help cut emissions and lower the energy costs.
The battery is capable of storing enough energy to power the stadium for a whole football match.
On top of this, 100% of the club’s energy is renewable, including all sites across the stadium, training facilities and offices. The Emirates is also easily and primarily accessible by public transport, reducing carbon emissions associated with travel.
The stadium also has a stringent single-use plastic reduction and removal strategy in place, which includes the provision of reusable cups to cut down on waste. And this works well for the club as, they send zero waste to landfill.
All general waste is hand sorted to remove all reusable or recyclable materials, equating to a matchday waste recycling rate of 90%.
In the KM2 area in and around the stadium, air pollution is high at 95, but the median energy efficiency score sits at 78. The area also utilises 387 megawatts of heat per hour on leisure and sports and leisure alone. In total, the area’s total heat usage hits 280,193 megawatts per hour.
In 2015, Emirates installed a new LED lighting solution to reduce energy consumption by 30% – a significant improvement on the 2000-watt metal slide lights previously used.
Brighton and Hove Albion’s Amex stadium is the Premier League’s second greenest stadium, with a score of 59.23. The stadium is 100% powered by renewable energy across all associated club locations.
In third place, it’s a three-way tie between West Ham’s London Stadium, Crystal Palace’s Selhurst Park and the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium. With a score of 57.9, the stadiums have all introduced effective sustainability policies and practices. Both West Ham and Tottenham’s stadiums use 100% renewable energy, whilst Selhurst Park are investing in becoming wholly LED operational to increase energy efficiency.
Unfortunately, Aston Villa lies bottom of the table with a score of 25, because of high air pollution levels, average energy efficiency and high heat usage.
Methodology
For the indexes created by Bionic, data was used to determine which Premier League 2022/23 club’s stadiums were the greenest. This study was based on data from the Office of National Statistics to analyse the Governments’s ratings of energy efficiency for particular postcodes.
StadiumDB was used to analyse Stadium data providing information, such as renovation dates and other supporting data. Heat usage for particular postcodes was analysed using the UK CHP Development Map, which is designed to geographically represent the heat demand across various sectors within the United Kingdom. addresspollution.org by the Central Office of Public Interest (COPI) was used to analyse accurate air pollution data across different postcodes.
Data is pulled from a national 20m/sq resolution model created by Imperial College London (ICL). To ensure accuracy, COPI sourced and mapped real-world pollution levels recorded at more than 19,500 council monitors in every major town and city across the UK. The scientists at ICL were then able to calibrate to these real-world levels – resulting in the most detailed and accurate national model ever created.
