Shoreham Football Club are proud members of the UN Sports for Climate Action. The Musselmen have an ongoing commitment to carbon neutrality and look at every aspect of the day to day running of the club to take note of what impact they have on the planet.

They are focusing on the main contributing areas to climate change: Energy, Transport and Food/Catering and these three factors account for the majority of everyone’s daily carbon footprint.

As a member of the UN Sports for Climate Action Shoreham are looking bring the football clubs carbon footprint down as much as possible and to hopefully influence our supporters/community and fellow clubs to do the same.

Their main principles are:
• They will continue to try and reduce our own environmental impact as much as possible
• When making any operational decisions, they will consider any ethical and sustainability concerns
• They will not work with any organisation directly involved in fossil fuels, animal testing, tobacco, fracking or anything we feel to be unethical or immoral
• They seek to influence and educate supporters/community and fellow clubs to improve their carbon footprint

As a part of their commitment to UN Sports for Climate Action their long-term plan is to publicly set reduction targets aligned with 1.5-degree in line with science.

With Shoreham’s commitment to climate change and ensuring their carbon footprint decreases, their energy supply is totally green.

Shoreham chairman, Stuart Slaney, said: “I believe that it is everyone’s duty to ensure we contribute, no matter how small, to helping climate change. This is a real problem that we can’t ignore. With Shoreham FC being a prominent figure in the local community and on the non-league stage we can use our position to encourage other football clubs and supporters to join us in making a difference.

“Firstly, we tackled all the really quick, and small wins, such as removing the use of all plastic bottles and moving to Eco-friendly Bisphenol A (BPA) free plant-based bottles, swapping out all pint and half pint plastic glasses to biodegradable PP Flexy Plastic beer tumblers and introducing recycling bins around the ground.

“Our next steps were to start removing all the old tube lighting around the ground and its buildings and replacing them with low consumption LED lighting. Currently we have replaced 95%, this obviously comes at an initial cost but the savings of consumption and practically zero maintenance over a period of time is well worth it.

“We then moved our focus on to the catering side of things. We replaced all takeaway products such as polystyrene plates and cups with bio recyclable catering products and introducing an optional vegan menu. Which means we can reduce the amount of meat products we purchase for resale.

“We are also looking at the areas where we can’t directly affect such as fans traveling to our home matches. Everyone that enters the stadium has a carbon footprint and getting to and from the ground adds to this. So, we are proud to introduce our off-setting carbon  footprint programme. 

“If a fan travels to the ground via public transport, bicycle or EV, and can prove so at the turnstiles then the club will donate a percentage of their match-day ticket money to off-set their carbon footprint to a climate crisis solutions organisation. Currently we are planting 30 trees per month to help towards our off-setting carbon footprint programme.

“Like all clubs at our level and above we have stadium floodlights. Our floodlights need to be upgraded to the latest LED technology.

“This is, as you can imagine a huge financial investment and the club is currently talking to 3rd party organisations in order to raise the funds for the upgrade. The club will keep everyone updated on this major part of our climate change project.

“Our main day to day reduction was obviously our electricity/energy consumption. With many energy providers still not offering a totally 100% green energy alternative which included our own supplier,  we looked at all alternatives and eventually migrated over our energy supply to Octopus Energy.

“Shoreham Football Club will continue to reduce its carbon footprint and help climate change by working with the United Nations Sports for Climate Action group,  Octopus Energy and many other organisations.

“If you would like to know more about getting your club involved then please contact us now.“

For more information about Shoreham please contact:

Shoreham Football Club
T: 01273 454261
E: shorehamfootballclub@gmail.com