Club & Society Sustainability

I went to the Chartered Management’s Annual Convention down in Birmingham last week and jolly good it was as well too. I’ve realised that the thing I like about conferences these days is that they often give you an opportunity to look at your own work from a distant, removed point of view. You might not necessarily learn any new skills but you always come away with a new idea or a new way of approaching a particular subject.

The opening speaker was from a company called Johnson Matthey – they work mainly with precious metal and using them as catalysts in chemical processes. So far, so ho hum. But it was less his background and more the concepts he was talking about that interested me. The subject of his talk was Sustainability and how as a principle it should be embedded into the planning and operations of any business. He outlined that it wasn’t simply an additional initiative outside of the day to day running of any business that could be tossed away when, like now, economic times were not so great. Instead, he stated that sustainability, if used as a key process, could lead to more efficiency and cost savings. Therefore, there was never actually a better time to focus on it.

It got me thinking – for a club or society, what does sustainability look like? Its funny because we have an award in our annual award ceremony but I don’t know if we’ve ever bottomed out exactly what we mean. Is it from an environmental point of view? Or looking simply from the direction of ongoing financial stability? Furthermore, its not a concept that we raise at any point with our committee volunteers – it doesn’t form any part of either the initial induction or the mid-term review meeting. We seem to be therefore expecting that our volunteers both understand what the concept means and that they can take this concept and from it form initiatives that affect the way their activity runs improving it for the future.

It seems to me that before we can get volunteer buy-in, we need to make sure they understand what we are saying. And I think the way that we make them understand what we are talking about is to give them clear examples of what a sustainability initiative or goal looks like. The speaker gave a couple of good examples: “Achieve zero waste to landfill” & “Halve the key resources we consume (per unit of output)”. Whilst these are clear in a commercial environment, how would this translate to the football club?

Sport is a clear area where sustainability needs to be considered but is probably furthest from people’s thinking. We calculated that last year we produced 3.1 tonnes of CO2 from the volume of travelling that our sports teams did getting to their various fixtures. We’ve tried to reduce the amount of travelling we do, the number and size of the vehicles we use, and where possible we try to put teams together in buses. We’re not doing this because we are concerned about the amount of environmental damage we are doing – its purely a cost-saving exercise. In the end, we could only reduce it to a certain level so we chose to offset our production by donating to a tree planting project. I’d like to think we’ll also be looking to use hybrid and electric vehicles when more come onto the market in the coming years.

But we are only one institution who plays sport in the UK. BUCS (British Universities & Colleges Sport) is the governing body that covers over x institutions who take part in sport. Some of them are smaller than us in terms of their programmes, some are larger. It would be unfair to simply take our carbon total and multiple it by the number of institutions as this might over state the amount of CO2 produced by competitive sport at University level. Some interesting stats you can find though are if you search for “sustainability” on the BUCS website, it yields one result – a link to a HEFCE event on wellbeing which is running in Newcastle at the start of next year. A similar search for “environment” yields more results (40), but none of these articles refer to any kind of policy about sustainability considerations – instead the search software is simply finding the world out of context in other articles or, in 12 instances, in job adverts.

I’m not stating this to pick on BUCS or try to embarrass them – mainly because I doubt they read this blog, but also because if they did I suspect not many of them would actually give a toss. And that to me is the major problem. How do you engage someone in this debate when they don’t see it as being an important consideration of their work?

There’s a step that we can take and a step that they can take. We need to brief our committees about this and get them to understand the importance of it. As the man at the conference said, “Long term the resources are going to become more scarce and therefore, more expensive”. We need to provide them with opportunities to think about how they current run their activities and how they can do it in a more sustainable way in the future. Another quote from the man, “As soon as cost-saving was called sustainability, the team had six times as many ideas.” There has to be a way to translate this into a language that makes sense for our committee volunteers.

But we also need big groups like BUCS to take a stand and start to lead this agenda. I know its going to be difficult because it doesn’t seem particularly sexy – but this is an organisation where people will volunteer to set fixtures and change league structures. Surely amongst the mechanics there’s someone with an interest in sustainability issues and how this relates to sport.

The more people who are talking about this, the more our students are likely to pick up on it and make the changes that they need to make to their groups.

Tags: BUCS, clubs and societies, sustainability