Marylebone Cricket Club ‘batting’ for a sustainable future

Article posted by Coliseum, November 4^th, 2026

Image: Coliseum GSVA

Stuart Dunlop is from the 31,000-seat Lord’s Cricket Ground in London (UK) where they are embedding sustainability into everyday activities. He is the Sustainability and Impact Lead at the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC), the owners and operators of the Lord’s Cricket Ground. He oversees initiatives like decarbonization and measuring and reducing Scope 3 emissions (all indirect greenhouse gas emissions that occur across a company’s value chain – both upstream [in its supply chain] and downstream [from product use and disposal] – from sources the company does not directly own or control).

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The Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) drives its environmental strategy through major carbon-reduction milestones at the Lord’s Cricket Ground.

In an exclusive exchange with ‘Coliseum’, Stuart Dunlop, Sustainability and Accessibility Manager, Lord’s Cricket Ground, UK, states that “Sustainability has been on the menu at the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) for some time actually. We were one of the sports clubs in the world to hire a full-time Sustainability Manager. This was back in 2009. Since then, I think we have gone on to achieve quite a lot on the sustainability front.”

Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC)

The Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) is an English cricket club founded in 1787 whose Lord’s headquarters are dubbed ‘the Home of Cricket’.

Lord’s Cricket Ground

The 31,100-seat Lord’s Cricket Ground, better known as Lord’s, is a cricket venue at St John’s Wood, historically in Middlesex and now in the City of Westminster, England (UK). Named after its founder, Thomas Lord, it is owned by the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC).

Sustainability Strategy

Stuart Dunlop kicked off the conversation by stating that the MCC are the guardians of the ‘Home of Cricket’. He underscored that since he has joined the club “we are delivering some of the actions in the last couple of years to keep playing cricket. So, what we have been doing over the past several years since I joined the club is defining a lot of strategies that will help us blueprint our path forward. We initially started with our sustainability strategy which was released in 2020. This was based on the UN Sustainable Development Goals.”

ESG Strategy

The next step the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) initiated was the Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) strategy which took a lot of the environmental initiatives from the sustainability strategy but also looked at the social elements and the governance elements of what the MCC can do as a club for the local community.

Zero Carbon

Dunlop informed that the third document is the journey to zero carbon – “This was released in 2023. It is based on the principles of UN Sports for Climate Action Framework and we are aiming to achieve zero carbon on Scopes 1, 2 and 3 by 2040 and Scope 1 and 2 by 2030.”

Solutions at Lord’s

The first one and the key one for sustainability at the club is energy. Since 2016, the Marylebone Cricket Club have been sourcing renewable electricity and “we have annual energy reduction targets of about 10 percent each year. We don’t get to those targets each year but there is something to aim towards and to help us achieve this we have introduced building management systems (BMS) throughout the grounds. We have installed floodlight light emitting diodes (LEDs) and we have ground source heat pumps on the nursery pitch which provides heating and cooling to three of the stands in the ground.”

Waste Management

Dunlop pointed out that in terms of waste, the Lord’s Cricket Ground produce around 300 to 320 tonnes each year. Around 55 to 57 percent of this is recycled. The food waste goes to the anaerobic digestion facilities, the general waste is sent to energy recovery and that is then reused back for the trucks that comes to collect the waste in the first place. He emphasized that it was a good example of circular economy.

Pitch Management

No artificial pesticides or fungicides is used on the Lord’s pitch.

Catering

Catering is a huge operation at Lord’s – “We have our own 20 kitchens at the stadium and in that context one kitchen, the central kitchen, produces about 11,000 covers (the volume of meals the kitchen staff must prepare and serve during a match day) for one day of a Test match. So, naturally this is a huge operation and this forms majority power of our Scope 3 supply chain.”

AI Pilot

The Marylebone Cricket Club concluded an artificial intelligence (AI) pilot with a company called ExpectAI. Dunlop explained that what they do is they convert the span-based accounting for the Scope 3 management into activity-based data – “That means we have real data coming in and extremely accurate and I can go to a supplier and say I have an understanding of your impact on our scope-free supply chain which means that they can take measures to reduce their Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions and there are various different actions and initiatives that the two provide and order for them to get in our stadium.”

Wrap-up

Lessons Learned

Stuart Dunlop concluded by stating, “What we have learnt after adopting different initiatives – specifically relating to energy – is that sustainability can bring about a future for the club which is sustainable and profitable.”

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