Crewe Alexandra Football Club

Crewe Alexandra Football Club compete in the English Football League pyramid and are affiliated to the Cheshire Football Association.

The men’s first team play their home games at the Mornflake Stadium at Gresty Road, and train at their Reaseheath Training Centre, whilst the ladies first team and youth teams play their home games at The Alexandra Soccer Centre in Shavington. This site is also the base of operations for Crewe Alexandra in the Community, the Corporate Social Responsibility arm of the football club.

Across all three sites, the club facilities require reliable waste management solutions ranging from waste and recycling collections to contracted skip hire with a trusted partner.

The Challenge

It’s natural that football clubs will notice a spike in waste generated on matchdays throughout the season. That’s only public facing though, as behind the scenes, they’ll create various types of waste all year round across all owned and managed facilities. For the waste management partner, this required greater organisation than a single-site customer and a coordinated approach to service delivery.

Crewe had also experienced reliability issues from their previous supplier in the past, leading to frustration from staff. This included missed or inconsistent collections, leading to overflowing bins and unnecessary time spent sorting it out.

The Solution

Brown Recycling is a proud waste management and recycling partner to sports clubs across Staffordshire and Cheshire, and our commitment to sustainability in sport saw us recognised as the Official Sustainability Partner of the Staffordshire Football Association in 2024 – an accreditation we’ve held since. With that level of trust and expertise, we continue to provide Crewe Alexandra a fully compliant solution for all their waste needs and have done since being appointed in January 2022.

Crewe Alexandra would need to adopt the Source Segregated Recycling (SSR) approach to waste management. This Simpler Recycling solution puts the onus on the customer to segregate food waste and recyclable materials from residual (non-recyclable) waste at source, rather than mix recyclable materials in one container to be separated later. By keeping materials separate from the outset, SSR reduces contamination, improves processing efficiency, and helps maximise recycling rates. Brown Recycling exclusively operates this collection method over alternative collection methods such as Dry Mixed Recycling (DMR) due to the higher quality recycling outcomes it delivers.

At the stadium, we rolled out containers for SSR, food, glass, cardboard and general waste plus a green waste skip for regular pitch maintenance.

At The Alexandra Soccer Centre, we provided containers for separate general waste and cardboard collections and at The Reaseheath Training Centre there are additional containers for food waste and SSR, on top of general waste and cardboard.

Brown Recycling enjoys supporting the football club beyond its commercial waste duties, with sponsorship and advertising opportunities also high up on the agenda. For ‘The Railwaymen’, we take seat cover advertising and matchday sponsorship packages, as well as digital screen advertising on matchdays too.

Outcome

With SSR in place since January 2022, Crewe have been Zero Waste to Landfill from day one of the contract, meaning 100% of their waste is diverted to fully compliant waste handling facilities instead. Examples might include turning the cardboard waste into recycled material and even the food waste into biogas and bio-fertiliser through a process called anaerobic digestion.