Community and Sustainability

At Eden Park we are committed to taking steps to reduce our carbon footprint and are currently on our own sustainable living journey. We are pleased with the progress made so far but understand that we have only just started down the road toward our goal of becoming New Zealand’s internationally recognised leader in stadium sustainability.

Water restrictions

Eden Park is committed to reducing our water usage and adhering to Auckland’s water restrictions. That means working with Watercare on a range of initiatives, including the installment of our very own water bore and bespoke treatment plant. By collecting and treating rainwater on-site and using it to water the field, we’re saving up to 16 million litres of town water per year. Rainwater collected from our Samsung South Stand catchment is also used for maintenance, landscaping an cleaning.

LED lighting

Our maintenance team has spent a lot of time changing light bulbs over the years! Over the past few seasons we have embarked upon a project to replace all sports and emergency lighting with LED products. Not only is this good for the environment but we estimate that we have saved one staff member about 50% productivity throughout each week.

Rubbish separation

All waste created from match days is now sorted on site. This involves collecting all the bins and separating this into four streams – recycling, cans, organic and general. This is managed by a local church group who use the funds generated to support their Sunday School classes.

Compostable Packaging

All food made on site is now packaged and sold in commercially compostable products. Every burger, chip, hotdog and pie is supplied in fully compostable packaging – along with every knife, fork and napkin! Our ‘Only Compostable’ Policy is being rolled out to all our suppliers and should see further reduction in landfill rubbish – our aim is to be at zero landfill waste by the end of 2023.

Onsite Gardening

Eden Park is also home to the Morningside Urban Market Garden. This garden is managed by a group of refugee ladies who also cultivate our compost bins. The garden is thriving with a mixture of microgreens and assorted leafy green vegetables which are sold to the local café.

The bees

For the past 18 months, the stadium has cultivated on-site beehives. We estimate that approximately 360,000 bees now call Eden Park home! Our bees travel up to five kilometres in the summer and three in the winter to search and collect pollen and we cannot keep up with demand for the honey harvested each season which is sold at our main reception desk.

Onsite composting

Twelve months ago we installed five 1.5 cubic metre blue gum compost bins on the Outer Oval. These bins are used to compost all non-match day kitchen preparation waste and we have recently started to integrate the bins into our match day waste streams. All food waste and packaging from retail is shredded and fed to the bins which produce wonderful dark compost about 10 weeks later (in high demand from both our neighbours and staff).