Water harvesting and solar panels to make Croke Park even more environmentally sustainable

By John Harrington

Croke Park’s ongoing sustainability drive will accelerate further this year with the installation of water-harvesting tanks in the stadium, and solar panels at the turf farm in the Naul.

The water-tanks will be stored underground on the site of the recently demolished old handball centre behind the Cusack Stand and will take water off the roof of Croke Park which will then be used to irrigate the pitch.

“It’s about being more sustainable and there are two parts to that,” says Croke Park Stadium Director, Peter McKenna.

“One is the risk of not having sufficient water to irrigate the pitch and the pitch is the centre-point. It's the reason we have Croke Park. Sometimes we lose sight of the fact that despite all of the big facilities we have throughout the country, people come to watch a game. So the pitch is the most important asset we have.

“We're currently irrigating it with potable water but that’s not a sustainable thing to be doing on a continuous basis. There's also the risk of not having sufficient potable water if there was restrictions put on the city.

“We're also going to add a UV cleaning unit onto it so that water we take in, if there was a boil notice in the city, we would be able to use to keep our kitchens open.

“So, there's a multi-faceted approach to it. First and foremost, from a sustainability point of view, the right thing to do is to harvest as much rain-water as we can and we use it on the pitch.

“Rainwater is better for irrigating a pitch anyway. It doesn't have the chemical constitute that you get in potable water which is used for human consumption.

“The second part then is that we de-risk the operation of the stadium in time of water shortage or drought.”

The GAA are also currently working with Amarenco to install a significant amount of solar panels on the turf farm in the Naul that will help the stadium on its journey to becoming carbon neutral.

“It will be a10 to 12 mega-watt facility that gives us the ability to claim carbon neutrality in terms of Croke Park,” says McKenna.

“Croke Park would use six megawatts in a year so that's a real statement of sustainable intent.

"It's also very good use of the land. The Naul farm is 60 acres and the solar panels will require about 35 acres, so just over 50 per cent, which doesn't diminish what we're doing in terms of pitches.

“The turf farm hasn’t just been very successful in terms of growing our own pitches for Croke Park, but also distributing high-quality goal-mouths and pitch services to GAA clubs across the country.”

It's also worth saying that by growing their own turf now rather than importing it, the GAA has significantly reduced carbon emissions associated with importation.

Environmental sustainability has long been a central focus for the Croke Park team. It has been a zero waste stadium since 2014, with 100 per cent of waste recycled, reused, or recovered.

Croke Park was the first stadium in Ireland and Britain to secure both ISO 14001 and ISO 20121 standards, and more recently became the first stadium in the world to obtain certification to the newest International Environmental Standard, ISO 14001:2015.

The goal now is a 50 per cent further reduction in the stadium’s carbon footprint by the end of the decade.

“As an organisation we are totally committed to making everything we do as sustainable as possible,” says McKenna.

“We're very proud to say that 85 per cent of all the ingredients here in Croke Park are sourced on the island. And 70 per cent of the ingredients are sourced within 50 miles of the stadium. That takes a lot of ingenuity from the chefs to design the menus to make that happen but we strongly believe in being as sustainable as we possibly can.

“We're still very proud that we have a zero to landfill policy and we've maintained that. We're the first in the world to achieve ISO 20121 which are all precursors of where we need to go.

"We're now going to lock ourselves into science-based targeting which is the gold standard and really push ourselves to the Paris accord objectives which is a 50 per cent reduction in our carbon footprint by 2030 and a net zero by 2050."