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.

Some of the most progressive road races in the US were in attendance at last weekend’s Road Race Management workshop on green running events. Everyone had good news and great ideas to share, but I was most impressed by the strides these three events are making:

The AT&T Austin Marathon is a member of the Greenteam that’s being promoted by Runner’s World and Nature’s Path Organic–the only concerted effort I’ve seen that draws attention to the good work many events are doing. (In fact, absent a sponsor conflict with Nature’s Path, I cannot see why every event that is making tangible progress toward environmentally responsible goals and objectives wouldn’t want to be a part of the Greenteam.)

In addition to being a Greenteam member, the AT&T Austin Marathon features a few green innovations that didn’t show up anywhere else in my pre-workshop survey of running events:

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The status quo for today’s participant sporting events is shockingly wasteful.

If you wonder just how wasteful, read this post on another blog I keep. It talks about a bike race I do that accounts for nearly 500,000 miles driven by race participants over the course of a weekend!

On the brighter side, there’s a movement afoot to reduce the impact of running events, triathlons, bike races and the like. Just as more and more people are becoming familiar with the threats of global warming, so, too, are everyday athletes becoming more concerned about the tremendous side effects of the events they participate in regularly.

Lee and I are pleased to be a part of the effort to create more environmentally responsible participant sporting events. For both of us, it’s a logical extension of our professional careers and our active lifestyles, not to mention the role we played as Cascade Run Off Race Committee members in 1981–the year the Run Off rejected the status quo and offered above-the-table prize money to its winners.

We were pleased to be agents of change in 1981 and we are excited to be agents of change once again.