Are running events an environmental disaster?

Before I start, a disclaimer: this is the most Guardian article ever to appear, at least on the running blog. Next up: can organic Fairtrade carbon-neutral quinoa make you run faster?

But, that aside, anyone who has looked at their feet during a busy race (most of us, then) will have found it hard not to note the sheer numbers of discarded, almost entirely full, bottles of water or sports drinks bouncing along the ground – not to mention dumped promotional flyers, bin bag “tops” if it’s been rainy, and even the odd item of clothing.

The Royal Parks half marathon in London makes a big deal of its environmental sustainability. I wondered what a race organiser might need to consider when making an event “sustainable” – and, of course, whether any event of 16,000 people can ever really be described as such.

While much is obvious – recycling those plastic bottles, getting all the discarded clothing to Oxfam, making the medals out of FSC-approved wood rather than more plastic – several things came up that I hadn’t even considered. Rigging and de-rigging for a huge event that requires road closures takes days. The Royal Parks team try to do it all during daylight hours. Sounds like a no-brainer, but presumably more challenging when in the busiest bits of central London.

Then there’s all that food. I did a lovely small race recently, the Richmond Imperial, where the finishers got treated to huge trays of homemade brownies or flapjacks. Easy enough to achieve with a few hundred people, and definitely no leftovers (too tasty). But what to do with the leftover runners’ bananas and other produce from the big Royal Parks festival? The team at Fairshare collect and redistribute.

The Royal Parks race is often accused of overpricing, and at £47 it is pretty expensive by anyone’s standards. One of the organisers’ defences for the high cost is that they use sustainability measures, rather than price, when it comes to sourcing. For instance, the race T-shirts are made from recycled polyester, sourced from plastic bottles – 10 bottles makes a shirt. They also send out all their information by email rather than post.

The fact is, these efforts are not laudable; they are just what everyone should be doing as a matter of course. I’m glad to see that the event organisers have bought in the University of Westminster to do a proper study into their sustainability, so there is an independent measure of their success – or failure.

Small races are inherently more “green”: a few volunteers to pick up and hopefully recycle empties, communication by email, no T-shirts to churn out … But I think as keen runners, we’ve all probably entered at least one big race. Is the waste generated something that bothers you, or should I just donate my stockpile of race T-shirts to Oxfam, get back to my muesli, tuck my sandals under the chair and stop being such a Guardianista?

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