How you choose to watch a football match makes a
bigger difference to your carbon footprint than you might imagine,
according to research from the
Produced with the Football Association (FA) for last
Sunday's Community Shield tie, the research shows that watching a
match on a mobile or tablet connected to 3G could have a carbon
footprint ten times larger than using the same device while
connected to broadband.
Dr Paul Swift, an analyst at the Carbon Trust, said
the reason that using a mobile data connection can lead to a carbon
footprint of 3.6kg, while using a broadband can be between 0.06 and
0.38kg (per person per match), is because of the comparatively
smaller number of users and the fact that only one person tends to
use a mobile screen at a time.
If watching in a group -- either in a pub or at home
-- the TV remains the lowest carbon way to watch football per
viewer, although different sorts of televisions have different
"bootprints". LED-screen televisions are the most energy efficient,
followed by LCD and then plasma -- the latter generating
approximately a third more emissions than a similar-sized LED
screen. Meanwhile the most carbon intensive way of watching
football is going to see the game live, thanks to the impact of
transport and food and drink consumption.
"It's an issue of how many people share the
resource," Swift told Wired.co.uk. "That applies to transport, if
you have four people in a car, you're doing okay whereas if you
have one its very carbon intensive, similarly it applies to screens
so if I've got my TV and I've got my family sitting around it then
actually my carbon emissions are tiny."
In order to generate the figures, the researchers
asked mobile networks how much energy and gas was used in providing
data and made an estimate about how much of this would be spent
during a football match.
"The biggest challenge that we faced was the carbon
footprint of broadband. We looked at different estimates that were
out there, publicly, they vary quite a bit," said Swift. "One of
the pieces of information that we would love to gather but isn't
out there publicly is, how many servers are on the internet and
what's their power consumption."
The researchers found that the combined footprint of
the Community Shield, which was attended by more than 80,000 fans,
including travel, food and broadcasted viewers, was 5160 tonnes of
The FA commissioned the information for an exhibition
at this year's season-opening match at Wembley because of its
commitment as a " Carbon Trust Standard" bearer to reducing its footprint. The research also found that more fans are opting to follow
football matches live on their devices -- 27 percent of smartphone
owners and 63 percent of tablet owners are using their devices to
watch live TV, with both Sky and BT offering apps that livestream
sport to mobile devices.