The system is STAR, the intelligent cup-tracking platform from Aucxis, and Edgbaston is its first deployment anywhere in the UK. Announcing the result on LinkedIn, the STAR team wrote: “Our first STAR deployment in the UK. And what a debut! At Edgbaston Stadium, one of the world’s most iconic cricket venues, 20,000 guests experienced a smarter reusable cup journey.” The post lists the headline figure plainly: a 98.79 per cent return rate.

How the cup flow works

Every reusable cup carries an RFID tag, so each one is individually identifiable rather than simply counted as stock. Fans drop their cups into RFID collection points on the way out, the reader identifies what has been returned, and the deposit refund is issued automatically to the right account. Crucially, that holds even when someone else carries the cups back, which is what normally happens in a stadium bowl when one person in a group does the run. There is no app to download, nothing to scan and no queue to join.

Aucxis has not published the hardware detail for the Edgbaston installation, and neither the frequency nor the reader models have been stated. Schemes of this type generally use UHF RAIN RFID in the 860 to 960 MHz band, because it is the only common option that will read a bin-load of tagged cups in bulk at speed rather than one at a time. That is standard practice for this class of system rather than a confirmed specification for this venue.

Why the number matters

Reusable cup schemes only stack up environmentally and financially if the cups actually come back. A cup that leaves the ground in a rucksack is a cup that has to be replaced, and washing and reuse economics fall apart quickly as loss rates climb. A 98.79 per cent return rate on a 20,000-guest event day puts the losses into the low hundreds, which is the difference between a sustainability initiative on paper and one that works.

Item-level tagging is also what removes the back-office cost. As STAR put it on LinkedIn: “Together with Event Cup Solutions, Levy and Re-uz, STAR uses RFID technology to make every cup traceable and every deposit refund automatic. No manual counting. No refund hassle. No unnecessary queues. Just a smarter cup flow, backed by real-time data.”

Real-time data is the underrated part. Because every cup is read as it moves, operators can see stock positions and return rates during the event rather than reconciling them days later, which is the point at which most deposit return schemes lose money quietly.

A busy season to prove it on

Edgbaston is running the system through a heavy fixture list that includes the Women’s T20 World Cup and Vitality Blast Finals Day, both of which fill the ground and both of which end with tens of thousands of people trying to leave at once.

Adam Hucknall, General Manager of Levy at Edgbaston, said the project was “another excellent example of strong partnerships” and that the automated STAR solution “represents important progress”.

Operations Director Lucy Hayes pointed to the exit experience: “We remove one of the biggest frustrations for fans: queuing at day’s end, making visits smooth from arrival to departure.”

The deployment was delivered by Aucxis with Event Cup Solutions, Levy and Re-uz. STAR called it “a great milestone for STAR and another example of what strong partnerships can achieve”, and for UK stadium operators watching their own deposit return numbers, the 98.79 per cent figure is the one worth noting.

Read more at https://star.aucxis.com/star-zet-voet-aan-wal-in-het-britse-cricket-bij-edgbaston-stadium/