Chips company Lay’s is well into a project that combines environmental sustainability with community youth engagement. The firm is partnering with its longtime Champions League partner, UEFA, and grassroots soccer organization Streetfootballworld to provide the world’s first five soccer fields made out of potato chip bags.
The project is known as RePlay, and for this project, Lay’s has committed to using an innovative new bags-to-turf technology to create playable fields. “[It’s] giving our chips packaging a second life,” Sebnem Erim, global food brands VP for PepsiCo, which owns Lay’s, told fastcompany.com.
The process, developed with artificial fields manufacturer Greenfields, takes empty chip bags from local waste and recycling, then washes and shreds them. Then this is mixed with rubber to convert them into pellets. On top of these pellets, an artificial turf is placed. The fields, which cost about $200,000 - $250,000 to build, are estimated to have a life span of about 10 years. At the EOL, the turf and Ecocept layers are both fully recyclable.
The first field opened in May in Tembisa, South Africa. Next up will be fields in communities in Brazil, Turkey, Russia, and the UK, to be completed before the year’s end. Erim says sites are chosen for where they’re likely to have the largest social impact with a community.
