UAE: No plastic please! This cricket team shows us how to build a better future
The Desert Vipers, one of the six franchise teams in ILT20, the UAE's IPL-style T20 league, have eliminated plastic bottles for players and introduced player jerseys made from recycled material.
'We became the first sports organisation in Dubai to sign up to the United Nations Sports for Climate Actions Framework, which binds us to report annually on our emissions,' Matt Bailey, Head of Strategy, the Desert Vipers, told the Khaleej Times.
'It also binds us to certain targets, so the Desert Vipers must reduce their carbon emission by 50 per cent by 2030 and we are bound to work towards net zero by 2040. So now we have targets to work towards and we need to look at our own operations and think about what we can do to reduce our emission.'
The Vipers' team of strategists have already taken some groundbreaking initiatives to help make a difference.
'We use water dispensers, individual water bottles in matches and in training, you will not see a Desert Vipers player drinking water out of a plastic bottle because we have eliminated plastic bottles,' Bailey said.
'We have actually eliminated 14,400 water bottles through this initiative. We have also introduced the world's first professional sports team's recycled kit. So everything our players are wearing is made of recycled material. And the players are absolutely loving this kit, we have got this done from a local UAE company.
'Also, we collected plastics and turned that into fan jerseys. So we are also distributing fan jerseys that are made from recycled plastic bottles that we collected from last season's sustainability match.
'We want to do our best to be part of the solution. We want to take our fans, our community and other sports teams on our journey.
'And we measure our carbon footprint and we are the first cricket team in the world to publish a document on that. All these documents are online on our sustainability microsite.'
The Vipers are doing all that and more while also introducing cricket at Arab schools in the UAE, hoping to produce the first professional Emirati cricketer in the next few years.
Jack Luffman, Development Lead, Desert Vipers, has visited four Arab schools in the UAE where he spent hours teaching the local kids the art of playing cricket.
'The franchise decided to go to the sustainability roots and as part of that, we did a schools programme, it was an introduction to cricket, much like the all-star cricket programme in England. So we did that through our sustainability lenses,' Luffman told the Khaleej Times.
'As part of the schools programme, we went to some of the Arab schools in the UAE, where we showed kids how to bowl and bat and after the cricket sessions, we sat down with them and spoke to them about how we can all play a part in saving our beautiful world.'
Some of the school students are too young to comprehend the significance of sustainability initiatives, but Luffman says cricket was a good tool in finding the balance.
'It (cricket) is a bit untapped sport in a lot of these Arab schools. I think kids in those schools follow the Premier League (football) and Ronaldo and Messi and a bit of basketball as well,' he said.
'But the response from them was very encouraging when we went there to introduce cricket. Once they realized that cricket is fun, they enjoyed playing, they bowled, they batted and they really enjoyed taking catches. It was a great fun activity for them and for us it gave us a great opportunity to talk to them also about what we are trying to do to build a better world for the future.'
Sport, Bailey says, is also a great platform to inspire children from all backgrounds to become responsible global citizens.
'Climate change is an existential threat for us. Sports and cricket in general have an amazing capacity to act as a catalyst to change. It's a fantastic platform though which to communicate with people,' said Bailey.
'I was reading a very interesting study the other day by an American University and they were looking at what type of people have been most influential in the world today. The study shows that more than 50 per cent of the world's influential people are the sports people or entertainers.
'So sports icons can inspire people to change their behaviour and we (Desert Vipers) want to do our best to be part of the solution.'
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