Resource Conservation

Less is more. Conserving resources at VfL.

Professional football certainly isn’t one of the most environmentally friendly sports in the world. However, at VfL, we are committed to using our resources as efficiently and environmentally friendly as possible:

Water:

Keeping our training pitches and the pitch at the Volkswagen Arena in perfect condition all of the time requires a lot of maintenance and, above all, water. Every year we save about eleven million litres of drinking water by irrigating our pitches with greywater from the central canal. In addition, water-saving taps in the VIP section and 230 waterless urinals in the Volkswagen Arena provide additional water savings.

Energy:

We had already switched to 100% green electricity at VfL back in 2011. This switch alone allows us to save over 1,000 tonnes of CO2 emissions every year. The LED floodlights system that we installed in 2017 also consumes a third less energy than conventional floodlights, according to the manufacturer – less maintenance and a lifetime of 50,000 hours also saves further (environmental) costs. In addition, we use LEDs in the underground car park and VIP sections, and we plan to expand their use even further in the coming years.

Waste

Waste isn’t only an environmental, but also a climate problem (waste incineration). Even though waste separation is capitalised on in Germany, in practice there are still problems in many places due to a lack of processes. This also applies to major events, such as our matchdays. As part of our environmental and climate strategy, we are constantly looking for innovative ways to separate and avoid waste, and we are gradually changing our processes. Whilst waste separation has been part of our everyday lives for a long time, we are continuously working on improving the processes on our matchdays. Even though the road to completely avoiding waste (Zero Waste) is still long, we have already set important milestones, for example, with the implementation of reusable cups and participation in the RECUP system.

Paper

In our offices, we use 100% recycled paper and make sure that we use environmentally friendly paper for all printed materials, such as autograph cards, whenever possible. We are currently working on the concept of paperless offices, as well as a solely digital ticketing system that would replace the currently used plastic tickets..

We have already received several awards for our measures: