Forest Green chairman hits back at safety criticism for new wooden stadium

Forest Green chairman Dale Vince hits back at safety criticism for their new wooden stadium which was recently given the green light.

Speaking as a guest on BBC Radio Two’s Jeremy Vine show, Vince answered questions about the high-profile much anticipated project, specifically doubts over the safety of building a stadium fashioned entirely from wood.

He said: “Seventy-five per cent of the carbon footprint of sports stadia is embedded in the materials they are made from. Wood is just a good old fashioned building material. Modern timber is engineered to be fire retardant.

“Wood is safer in a fire than steel because steel collapses at high temperatures. Wood simply chars away to destruction, but that takes a long time. Stadia today are designed to be evacuated in a handful of minutes so nobody gets trapped if there is a fire.”

Forest Green has become known as the world’s most eco-friendly football club and in December 2019 was granted outline planning permission for the new 5,000-seat stadium, which will be located off Junction 13 of the M5 motorway.

The club’s plans had been initially rejected by Stroud District Council in June, with Vince describing the verdict as “farcical”.

In August, the club resubmitted the plans to the council’s planning committee who then ended up voted in favour of the designs.

The League Two side selected Zaha Hadid Architects to design the new stadium in November 2016, when they were still a non league club, and has spent years working on a project that ties in with its eco-friendly business model.

In 2018 Forest Green Rovers became the first football club in the world to be certified carbon neutral under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) initiative Climate Neutral Now.

In July 2019, the greenest football club in the world, launched what they say is the world’s first football kit made from bamboo, before going on to take a further step to reduce its reliance on plastic by switching to revolutionary bamboo shin pads.

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