Newcastle United Football Club has secured its long-term target of achieving Carbon Trust Standard accreditation after installing a raft of environmental measures that have trimmed the club’s utility bills by almost a quarter of a million in just three years.

The football club, with the help of GET Solutions, undertook a significant investigation into how the club can significantly reduce its utility bills and simultaneously reduce its impact on the environment.  

Work undertaken at the club included a 580 ft bore hole, designed to take advantage of underground water reserves are reduce the club’s £40,000 a year water bill. The bore hole is expected to save the club around £500,000 over the next 12 years.

Speaking to the Newcastle Chronicle, Eddie Rutherford, Newcastle United’s Facilities Manager, said: “We started looking at the energy output about three years ago, and we’ve now got the Carbon Trust Standard. We are the only football club in the country with it other than Manchester United.

“We’ve done a number of things to cut costs, but this is more about getting best value. We’ve done a lot to make things more efficient – all common sense things – but the savings have become enormous.”

Measures installed ranged from replacing CFL lighting with LED systems, fitting infared sensor-activated lighting, adding valve wrap insulations and a complete rehaul of the east stand’s water heating.

Rutherford added: “It’s vitally important that we reduce our energy usage and we have been working very hard to make sure this is the case.

“From Newcastle United’s point of view, it’s also important that we reduce our costs and make the club as sustainable as possible.

The measures put in place have seen the club’s electricity consumption fall by 200,000kWh per week over the last four years, with gas consumption also down by 5 percent.

Rutherford concluded: “Even though we have noticed huge savings over the last few years, there is still a lot of work to do, and I would urge all football clubs to look at how much they are using and ways they can cut down.”