Carbon footprint of an FA cup semi final
As some of you may be aware, there is an FA cup semi-final this afternoon between Manchester United and Manchester City.This final is being held at Wembley, which means that over 60,000 fans will be making the journey down the M1 to London and back again.The semi-final of the FA cup was not always played at Wembley, in fact up until 2008 it was played at a variety of venues.With 31,500 tickets allocated to each set of fans, it made me wonder what the carbon footprint of 63,000 people traveling up and down the country on an April Saturday afternoon. Please note, this is a bit of a quick calcualtion, but it should give you some indication....Given the average occupancy of a UK car is 1.58, with the benefit of doubt, we’ll assume that each car travelling to the game is carrying on average 2 people. This means that there could be as may as 31,500 cars making a 420 mile (2 x 210 miles) round trip to and from London this afternoon.Inputting this information into our Defra travel calculator and choosing average car (unknown fuel), produces some staggering results:
This number of journeys amounts to over 4,434 tonnes CO2e (equivalent carbon dioxide), made up of over 4,405 tonnes carbon dioxide, 25 tonnes of nitrous oxide and over 3 tonnes of methane. According to Mike Berners-Lee’s great book, How Bad are Bananas, this is equivalent to the carbon footprint of over 55 million bananas!
Clearly there will be a mix of transportation to and from the game including buses, trains and cars; you can have a go at your own calculations here.
However, I am sure that if the FA chose a venue that reduced the journey time and distance that the fans are forced to travel, they could reduce the overall emissions attributed to the match quite considerably!
I’m now off to watch the game on TV, enjoy!
