At 30, the Nigerian international player explains to the Italian daily “La Repubblica” how he tries to offset the CO2 emissions generated by all his travels. He pleads for a carbon tax on the biggest European clubs.
This is the goal he is trying to achieve: a life as a carbon-neutral professional gamer. William Troost-Ekong, defender in the Salernitana club in Italy, compensates for all the travel involved in his participation in Serie A, the Italian championship, by planting… trees. It has teamed up with an organization specializing in compensation, Tree me, which calculates the CO2 emissions generated by his away matches, his journeys by bus, car or plane, and he pays the sum which makes it possible to buy olive trees and plant them on abandoned agricultural land. The operation allows him to kill two birds with one stone: plant trees and thus capture carbon while helping local farmers to produce more at home.
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He explains his approach to the Italian daily The Republic : “The greatest environmental impact of our sport is travel, being in a championship, participating in international competitions, it requires travel, often by bus or plane“. But he adds that this does not mean that football is doomed to pollute: “We can evolve, innovate, and above all, we must do so, because football is a community that brings together billions of people who watch us.“
A carbon tax for the top five European leagues
William Troost-Ekong, 30, grew up in the Netherlands, his mother’s country, and spent all his vacations in Nigeria, his father’s country. In the first, he lived with the constant threat of rising waters, with Amsterdam barely two meters above sea level, and in the second, in Lagos, he saw air pollution increase, causing more and more respiratory problems, and thousands of deaths according to the World Health Organization (WHO). All this information was swirling around in his head when, a year and a half ago, he became a father and said to himself that he could no longer content himself with observing.
At the time he was playing in England, he first looked for a way to measure his carbon emissions, the ecological weight of his profession, and finally, it was when he was transferred to Italy, in January, that came up with this idea: planting olive trees in Puglia. And William Troost-Ekong does not stop there, he also campaigns for more general solutions, in particular the setting of a carbon tax for the five best European leagues, those which the high level obliges the most to move. “We are not just footballers, we must be responsible people, change also passes through us, because football is like the climate, it goes beyond all borders, geographical, social and cultural.he pleads.
