Chris Boardman has called for the sports and physical activity sector to “take action we can be proud of” on environmental sustainability.
The Sport England chair made the call during the SAPCA Annual Conference in Manchester last week. Boardman was one of the keynote speakers at the conference, held at Emirates Old Trafford in Manchester on 27 February.
In his speech, Boardman offered his insights into Sport England’s future direction of travel and the organisation’s Every Move sustainability strategy. He also outlined the challenges posed to sport by climate change.
“A report by the Scientists for Global Responsibility and the New Weather Institute – entitled Dirty Tackle – found that, without action, a quarter of the UK’s football pitches could be partially or totally flooded by 2050,” he said.
“Sport England’s mission is to get more people active and we can’t do that if pitches are unusable, you can’t reach them because of flooding or events are too hot to hold. So this is personal for us and to our stakeholders for very pragmatic reasons.
“This is what led Sport England to publish our first-ever environmental sustainability strategy, Every Move, last year. In developing the strategy, we talked to the sector – many of you – and participants.
“We found that three in five adults had at some point been prevented from taking part in a sport or being active by extreme weather. Four in 10 sports organisations had experienced weather-related disruptions to their activities.
“The FA alone estimated that 120,000 football matches are being lost annually due to adverse weather conditions. That’s the equivalent of seven million minutes of community football lost in one year alone.”
Boardman also touched on the topic of synthetic turf sports pitches, which are instrumental in allowing grassroots sports to take place during the UK’s winter months.
“From a sporting point of view, artificial grass pitches, or AGPs, have become an integral part of community sport because as far as activity is concerned, they’re brilliant,” he said.
“They provide a reliable, year-round playing surface, regardless of the weather. A properly maintained artificial grass pitch can sustain up to 80 hours of use a week, or 1,400 playing opportunities. Compared to a natural grass pitch, which can sustain just six hours a week and around 100 playing opportunities. That kind of difference is hard to ignore.
“Almost half of these pitches are based at schools or in education settings and have become integral to the PE curriculum. This reliability of service and availability, often in areas of greater need, is incredibly attractive, especially as we’re now much more aware of what the burden of inactivity costs us.
“People who are already active save our country £540 million on reduced GP visits and £780 million every year on reduced mental health service use. Artificial pitches play a significant part in realising those benefits. In fact, our current stock of 3G pitches across England is estimated to be worth almost £500 million per year in social value.”
He added, however that while synthetic pitches provide “wonderful health benefits” they are also “producing negative costs downstream”.
“The breakdown of plastic grass, and the roughly 50 tonnes of rubber infill each pitch currently requires, are producing microplastics,” Boardman said.
“If we are to continue using them, we must, in the short term, get very good at containment – and at the same time, vastly improve end-of-life recycling. Up to 500 pitches reach the end of their life every year – two to three times the current UK capacity for recycling at the single venue capable of doing it.
“If we don’t change, history will judge us and rightly so. I and Sport England are determined to be on the right side of it.”
To read a full report on Boardman’s speech – and the SAPCA Annual Conference – look out for Issue 2 of SportsNation magazine, the official magazine of SAPCA.