Every day, Panda trucks roll through towns and cities across Ireland, travelling alongside the communities we serve and bringing our teams into contact with customers, schools, businesses and local organisations along the way. It is through those everyday connections that opportunities to make a wider impact begin to take shape, and one of those opportunities took us to Wexford.
Since kicking off our partnership with Wexford FC in 2025, Panda has proudly backed the club’s Academy and developing Foundation, combining our community presence with a shared ambition that stretches well beyond ninety minutes of football. More recently, those efforts added another result to the scoresheet when, at Lidl Ireland’s sixth annual 1st Choice Supplier Summit, Panda received the Social Impact Award for our work with Wexford FC, recognition of an impact that has continued to travel far beyond the touchline.
Now, as our partnership moves further into its second year, there is enough to show for it:
Supporting communities through sport
Panda has committed more than €24,000 each year to support the Wexford FC Academy and Foundation, bringing our total investment across the first two years of the partnership to more than €48,000. But from the first whistle, this was never simply about funding. It was about finding the right teammate to turn that support into something that could travel much further.
Wexford FC was already strengthening its links with schools, young players, coaches, grassroots clubs and communities across the county, while Panda was already serving homes and businesses throughout many of those same communities every week. In football terms, the pass was sitting there waiting to be played: Panda could bring financial backing, environmental experience and an established connection with local households, while Wexford FC could bring the people, programmes, footballing infrastructure and trusted community relationships needed to put that support into play.
That is where sponsorship get off the bench and onto the training ground.
Funding can help put coaches in front of young players, open places on programmes and create opportunities across communities, while the Foundation’s growing network gives Panda new spaces in which to introduce sustainability alongside the teamwork, discipline and responsibility already being developed through sport.
And that connection is more natural than it might first appear. Football asks players to read what is in front of them, choose the right option and hit the right target. Recycling asks for much the same judgement, understand what you have, make the right call and put waste in the right bin. That thinking would soon give the partnership its next move: taking sustainability out of the stands and onto the pitch.
Taking sustainability onto the pitch
In July 2025, Panda employees joined Wexford FC Academy and Foundation participants for a day of football, games and community activity, moving our role from sponsor on the team sheet to active player on the field.
A simple football challenge invited young players to scan a series of Panda bins, choose the right target and make the throw, bringing the same split-second thinking used on the pitch into a completely different kind of decision. More than 30 volunteers, including Panda colleagues and Wexford FC players, got involved, helping turn the activation into a hands-on sustainability exercise with a little more bounce than the average recycling lesson.
The technique may have been different from finding the top corner, but the thinking behind it was much the same: read what is in front of you, pick the right option and hit the right target. And while the activity itself finished at Ferrycarrig Park, its impact did not stop at that.
Taking the result beyond Ferrycarrig
As the partnership continued to build momentum off the pitch, those efforts eventually put another result on the board.
Most recently, at Lidl Ireland’s sixth annual 1st Choice Supplier Summit, Panda received the Social Impact Award for our work with Wexford FC, a particularly meaningful recognition for a partnership built around making an impact far beyond football alone.
This accolade reflects what has been central to the game plan from kick-off. This was never intended to be a one-off community fixture, but an ongoing investment in young people, grassroots sport, inclusion, education and the communities Panda and Wexford FC already share.
What’s next?
Wexford FC is planning a new 6,000-capacity stadium at Killeens, a move that could significantly expand the club’s reach and create thousands of new touchpoints across matchdays, family activities and wider community events.
More Than Just a Match
Across Panda’s wider operations, 97% of the waste we manage is recycled or recovered, with our facilities, vehicles, people and technology all playing their part in keeping valuable resources in use. But sustainability does not only begin when something reaches one of our bins. It starts much earlier: in homes, in schools, among friends and families and, sometimes unexpectedly, in a football pitch. That is why partnerships like Wexford FC matter to us. They give us the opportunity to take sustainability beyond our day-to-day operations and put it into play in the communities we already serve, alongside wider investment in the people and organisations helping those communities thrive.
Across Ireland, Panda has already invested more than €60,000 in charitable and community impact initiatives, supporting work that creates opportunities, strengthens local connections and delivers value well beyond waste and recycling alone. And in Wexford, we want to keep that momentum moving up the pitch: backing the people already making a difference, finding creative ways to bring sustainability into everyday conversations and creating more opportunities for young people and communities to get involved.
Want to see how it all kicked off? Read more about how Panda and Wexford FC are Building Champions On and Off the Pitch.
