The Wembley Stadium pitch has been made of five per cent polyethylene plastic since midway through last season, and has become the world’s first fully recyclable football pitch.
The Wembley turf is completely removed twice a year — during music concert season in July and December — before being relayed. Standard Sport understands the turf is grown off-site in the north of England.
Other stadiums such as Anfield, the London Stadium, Tottenham Hotspur Stadium and a number of smaller venues in Turkey also supplement their pitches with reinforced plastic, to provide players with better footing and minimise pitch damage from condensed fixture schedules.
Many are a mixture of polyvinyl chloride, polypropylene and polyethylene. The Football Association (FA) favoured use of a single plastic, polyethylene, to aid the recyclability of the Wembley pitch twice a year.
October 2022 saw the part-plastic pitch trialled for the first time when the Lionesses beat the United States 2-1 in a friendly, before it was permanently introduced in the middle of the 2022/23 season.
There are plans for the used plastic, after each pitch removal, to be turned into benches to be stationed at grassroots football clubs and schools in the London Borough of Brent, as well as further afield.
The FA hope to place plaques and QR codes on each bench to explain the resonance with the national stadium.
Discussions are also ongoing around the possibility of turning the plastic after pitch removal into coats, goalposts, trophies for the annual FA Grassroots Awards, or office desks to be used in Wembley Stadium’s boardroom.
The new Wembley Stadium opened in 2007, and its pitch weighs around 800 tonnes. It will host England’s friendly against Brazil on Saturday evening, as well as their meeting with Belgium on Tuesday night.
