The other day, I had a great meeting with Ben DeWitt and Tom Taylor, the guys behind Compete Green and the Ojai 2 Ocean Marathon (half marathon, too). As they say: Our mission is to enjoy healthy, endurance lifestyles while promoting sustainability and environmental awareness through our events. We strive not to just use our beautiful world, but to become a growing and symbiotic part of it.

I’ve got to say, it’s so refreshing to see two young guys trying to do the right thing as they launch their green event management business. Not that I don’t have a lot of respect and admiration for all the event organizers of existing events that are trying to retrofit their product and processes to be more sustainable, but when you’re starting from scratch, like Ben and Tom are, it  can give you a tremendous head start on going green.

How so? Well, you can start fresh with a network of like-minded vendors, for one thing. Compete Green is working directly with suppliers like Greenlayer Sports, Tribute Sport and Walden Surfboards to source eco-friendly apparel, medals made from recycled materials and mile markers made from old surfboards, respectively. Add to that a commitment to support environmental charities — in Ojai 2 Ocean’s case by auctioning off the 13th and 26th mile markers — and you’ve got the makings of a green racing revolution.

As the green event movement matures, look for more young entrepreneurs like Ben and Tom to take up the mantle of racing towards a better environment.

When the Green Sports Alliance was launched on March 21, the New York Times Green Blog advanced the following point of view: the American public is generally more passionate and involved in sports than in politics.

As Allen Hershkowitz pointed out in his National Resources Defense Council post on Switchboard, the NRDC staff blog: Sports matter. Outside of the family, the most influential role models in our society are athletes and entertainers. The most widely watched TV shows worldwide are sports shows. And professional sports leagues are non-partisan businesses, so their embrace of environmentalism helps us deflect ideological and politically inspired attacks on the environmental agenda.

So, is it any wonder that last week, while Congress and the White House were busy puffing their chests over the Federal budget, I was more interested in seeing what the NBA was doing for its annual Green Week.

Watching the Chicago Bulls play the Boston Celtics, the first thing I noticed was the organic cotton “shooting shirt” Derrick Rose was wearing during warm-ups (I know it was organic cotton because the TNT announcers pointed it out). Then I noticed that all the players were wearing organic cotton shooting shirts (and I was told their headbands and wristbands were organic cotton as well). Then I noticed the NBA Green logo on the floor and the green padding on the backboard stanchions.

The NBA hadn’t missed a thing — they never do.

Local market initiatives and announcements ran the gamut from the Celtics clean-up day with Boston 8th graders to the roll-out of new recycling and composting bins in Portland’s Rose Garden. WNBA and D-League teams got involved as well.

In short, while our political “leaders” were frittering the week away, millions of NBA fans were being encouraged to join their favorite players in making a difference — living green, working green and playing green.

Indeed, in my humble opinion, last week sports definitely trumped politics.

I try not to rant too often. I’d rather look on the bright side of things. But, Alaska/Horizon Airlines really disappointed me on the return leg a recent trip to the Pacific Northwest.

Here’s the story:

On the flight from Santa Barbara to Seattle, I eagerly read the chairman’s letter in Horizon Air Magazine. Titled “Pitching In,” it was all about the airlines’ extensive recycling program (you can read it yourself on page 5 of the digital edition).  As I handed my recycling to the flight attendant, who accepted it cheerfully, I thought to myself: give yourself a pat on the back (her, not me).

On the trip home, however, I had a very different experience. So much for the chairman’s boast: “… we’re pretty picky about our trash. In fact, so picky that we make sure that every cup, bottle, piece of paper and box that goes on our planes comes off as recyclable items. … It’s accomplished by our flight attendants, who — working in tandem with our ground employees — hand separate every plastic cup, glass bottle, aluminum can, piece of cardboard, newspaper and magazine they can find.”

I’m sorry to report that, no, they don’t. The flight attendant on my return flight looked at me as if I grown two heads when I asked her where I should put my recycling. In fact, in a subsequent conversation about recycling, she was pretty cavalier about her lack of commitment to her boss’s green agenda. As I recall, her comment went something like this: “Why should I bother sorting things when the folks on the ground throw it all in the trash anyway?”

Why bother? Because your boss said you would, right there on page 5.

We’ve all had the experience of holding something in our hands that we knew was recyclable — a Tyvek envelope or race number, plastic bag, to-go coffee cup sleeve, Heatsheet, etc. — but we just couldn’t find a convenient place to recycle the item. Why?

Well, there are two answers to the question why:

1. there isn’t a viable market for the material, and/or
2. there isn’t a robust system for collecting the material.

Eco-Logistics has been working with AFMInc for quite some time on the mechanics of collecting Heatsheets at events for recycling, but a formal relationship with someone who would actually use the recycled material didn’t exist … until recently. We knew Trex Company was a likely partner, and AFMInc’s Wil Turner has been persistent, so here’s the good news:

Advanced Flexible Materials and Trex Company Announce Heatsheets Recycling Program

Recycled Thermal-reflective Blankets Will Become Durable and Eco-Friendly Trex Wood-alternative Decking and Railing

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This has been bugging me for a long time: tyvek, the material used to make race numbers, is a “cradle to cradle” material, meaning it can be recycled and reused in continuous cycles as the same product without losing its integrity or quality. Thus, cradle to cradle materials can be used over and over again, rather than being downcycled into lesser products. It drives me crazy that there isn’t a big effort to recycle tyvek–not just at races, but in corporate mail rooms across the U.S. as well!

The U.S. Postal Service proudly displays the Cradle to Cradle Certification logo on its packaging products, but can you recycle then at the Post Office? No! Nor do the mailing rooms of most big companies make an effort to recycle the UPS or FedEX envelopes they receive every day. Dupont has a recycling program in place, and a partnership with Waste Management, but shouldn’t the shipping companies themselves accept responsibility for collection?

On the race front, just think how many tyvek race numbers go uncollected every year. Millions of them. Millions of square feet of a cradle to cradle material. What a waste!

Electric City Printing and Marathon Printing both offer their clients the opportunity to recycle used and surplus race numbers, but you’ve got to know about their programs, they don’t actively promote recycling on their Websites.

Here’s a tip: next time you order race numbers, ask your provider to help you recycle any leftovers and all the used race numbers you can collect. And think about opportunities to collect them other than just at the finish line. Work with a retail partner to print a coupon on the back that rewards bringing the number in to a collection point for recycling.

At something less than one square foot per the average race number, it may not seem like much, but it all adds up.

And do me a favor: ask the folks in your office mail room to develop a system to recycle tyvek shipping envelopes.

I recently stayed at the Westin Colonnade in Coral Gables, and was pleased to see the hotel chain offers a “green” program for guests. Starwood Hotel Group’s Make A Green Choice program goes something like this: you hang the Green Choice card on your door by 2 am, and  you wake up in the morning to find a $5 voucher good for food and beverages in the hotel’s restaurant. Of course, the deal involves some sacrifice on the guest’s part, some of which is obvious and typical, some of which you only discover over the course of your stay.

The housekeeping staff doesn’t make your bed or exchange your towels–to be expected–but they don’t even come in your room to empty the waste basket or restock toilet paper, lotions, coffee, etc. Over the course of a lengthy stay, the imposition is likely enough to discourage all but the most stalwart eco-conscious among us from hanging the Green Choice card on the door yet again.

Truth be told, We did run out of tissue and lotion, and almost ran out of toilet paper. And, I did have to resort to using a second paper coffee cup after a few days–one I took from the coffee service in the meeting room for the conference I was attending–and I had to remember to stop by the front desk to ask for more coffee on my way up to the room each evening.

One question: why does a “green” hotel even offer paper coffee cups in its rooms–sleeping and meeting rooms alike? I would have much preferred to rinse out a real cup than the paper cup supplied in my room.

Second question: why, despite my comments from the podium, did the vast majority of meeting attendees opt to use the paper cups in the meeting rooms, rather than the real cups on offer?

FYI, the topic of my presentation at Road Race Management’s annual meeting of race directors was titled We’ve come a long way, baby, but have we, really? If folks won’t even opt out of using paper coffee cups, how much of an imposition will they tolerate from a hotel’s eco-friendly initiatives?

(By the way, there’s been a lot of comment on the Web that Starwood’s program is more about saving money on housekeeping staff than it is about going green. I’ll leave that debate up to somebody else. My interest is in having hotels develop green programs that really work, and engage their guests in making positive changes in their travel habits.)

The recently concluded Summer National Senior Games in Palo Alto, California, displayed a broad and consistent commitment to sustainability. From Sunny, the 2009 Senior Games Mascot, to the solar-powered torch and cauldron (pictured below), organizers were serious about impressing upon us seniors the value of pursuing sustainable actions — and they did it in an innovative and lighthearted way.

You probably can’t read the sign above, but it talks about the departure from traditional fossil-fuel burning torches typically used at the Olympic Games and other major sporting events. For these Games, the torch was powered by the sun and lit with LED lights (sorry no picture, I didn’t arrive in time for the torch relay), while the cauldron is made up of some 800  tiny mirrors that reflect the sun’s energy. Solar panels built into the cauldron capture energy from the sun throughout the day, so the cauldron can glow at night. The torch and cauldron were created by the folks at IDEO.

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One of the earliest posts on this Web site touted the good work Jeff Henderson and Jonathan Eng were doing at the Council for Responsible Sport. Since that post last March a lot of green events have come and gone, some of them greener than others, many of them were covered by the media and were included in a recent  recap of green races in the news.

In another recent post, I mentioned my strong feeling that any rating or ranking of green events should be as objective as possible. Of course, I knew that the Council for Responsible Sport was wrapping up its year of pilot projects and would be rolling out a very credible set of certification standards for any mass participant sporting event to pursue in 2009–exactly the kind of objective, third party validation of green efforts I was looking for.

Well, the time has come. The Council for Responsible Sport has just published their report on the State of Sustainable Sport, along with a press release and executive summary that outline the problems, solutions and major findings from the CRS pilot initiative. You can read and download it all directly from the home page of their Web site.

If you’re a race director, I really hope you’ll explore ReSport Certification in 2009. If you’re a journalist, I hope you’ll find this very important initiative worth mentioning in an upcoming column or article.

As mentioned in the previous post, the November issue of Runner’s World listed the 10 Greenest Races in the U.S. No doubt every race on the list deserved recognition for the good work they are doing, but there are a lot of other races across the country–and around the world–that are also doing their part to minimize their environmental impact. So how are we to know which races are truly the greenest?

One thing is for sure: objective measures are needed if the running media is going to be promoting one race as being greener than another.

I’m a big fan of the Council for Responsible Sport and their ReSport Certification program for participant sporting events. Their five metrics and the standards they are developing would be a much better way to figure out which races are the greenest than a simple review of what the races have to say for themselves in press releases.

Here’s hoping that next year Runner’s World will base their top-10 on the number of points participating races earn in the ReSport certification process.

Recently, we have had race directors contact us, wondering about using this new “plastic” that can be composted.  Specifically, they ask if it is something they should use for runners’ goody bags and other items.  Somehow the words “it’s compostable” have acquired a certain magic ring around events that are trying to minimize their environmental footrpint.

Our answer has been that PLA (polylactic acid, aka corn plastic) is not suitable for event use at this time because there are really no green options for its reuse.  Yes, it can compost, but only in a commercial composting setting.  And, even when composted, it breaks down into water and CO2 which adds nothing to the finished product.

The best option of course would be to remanufacture it into another PLA container, but we are not aware of any PLA container producer that is currently set up to take back this material from the public.  When one tries to recycle PLA with other plastics, like #1 PET plastic bottles, it becomes a contaminant due to its different chemical properties.  This increases the danger of having the entire load of plastics rejected. And, if PLA is somehow left in the batch of recycled plastic, it can harm the processing of the petroleum based plastics.

With the recent economic downturn, recycling markets including plastics are on thin ice, and we would hate to see them further disrupted by the introduction of PLA into their facilities.  We feel it is an improper use of resources to create a product that is used once and then discarded.  And, because it adds nothing to the composting process, we don’t give it much credit for its compostability either.

Recent articles in The Oregonian and Vancouver Green Business Journal offer a more in depth examination of this topic.