More and more races are asking participants what they think of the event’s efforts to green things up, typically as part of a post-event survey. But I can’t recall having a client ask runners about their green initiatives pre-race, specifically as part of the registration process.

In the there’s-a-first-time-for-everything category, the Chevron Houston Marathon folks are doing just that. And the response rate is not only high, but the rate of positive responses is very encouraging:

• When asked “are you aware of the Houston Marathon Committee’s efforts to go green,” 53% of registrants (8,188 runners) answered yes.
• When asked “is participating in a certified green event important to you,” 51% of runners (7,942 runners) answered yes.

In regards to the second bullet, Houston runners should be pleased: the Houston Marathon Committee intends to pursue certification from the Council for Responsible Sport next January.

By the way, Houston’s numbers compare very favorably with recent post-race survey results from the Credit Union Cherry Blossom 10 Mile Run:

• 63% of respondents said they were aware of Cherry Blossom’s application for CRS Certification, and
• 82% of respondents said that green certification was important to them.

Other tidbits from the Cherry Blossom survey included:

• 79% of respondents said there were “concerned” to “extremely concerned” about the environmental impact of running events, and
• 81% preferred receiving an iGiftBag Virtual Goodie Bag over a conventional goodie bag.

If you’ve got interesting survey results to share on the subject of greening races, please do so via the comments box.

A couple of posts ago, I wrote about effective signage.

As I was working on a blog post for the Council for Responsible Sport the other day, announcing newly certified races, I received some great photos from my friend April at the Bank of America Shamrock Shuffle. Their signs clearly meet the objectives for effective signage outlined in my previous post, and are worthy of a photo essay:

Shamrock Shuffle Green Team Ready to Recycle and Compost

Clearly Marked Bike Valet Parking at Shamrock Shuffle

Signage Pointing the Way to Bike Valet Parking at Shamrock Shuffle

By the way, Congratulations to April and her Green Team for earning Silver Certification from the Council for Responsible Sport!

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.

There’s a lot of signage to look at in this photo — all of it good.

But I’ll focus my comments on the blue recycling banner in the center of the photo. It’s one of 30 now in circulation, thanks to a joint investment by the Lilac Bloomsday Association, the Atlanta Track Club and Eco-Logistics.

The idea of our shared banner program is to meet each party’s needs without any one of us having to purchase an excessive inventory of banners. On an ongoing basis, Eco-Logistics needs as many as 10 banners to service the smaller events we work with, while Bloomsday and Peachtree each require as many as 20 banners on race day — so we split the order, and we share. In addition to race day use at Bloomsday and Peachtree, the banners in Spokane and Atlanta are available for use by other Spokane area special events and other races put on by the Atlanta Track Club, respectively.

The idea for the shared banner program came from a similar program for sharing Clearstream recycling containers (the wire frame with clear bag and blue top to the right in the photo) in Spokane. Last year, Bloomsday, Hoopfest and the CIty of Spokane invested in a couple hundred Clearstream recycling containers, which are made available to special events throughout the Spokane area.

If this post inspires you to purchase recycling station banners for your event, I’d like to encourage you to consider setting up a similar sharing program to ours — there’s no point in having stuff sit in a warehouse 364 days a year!

FYI, here’s a list of our objectives for this program:

At the recent Plastics Recycling Conference in New Orleans, held March 1-2, Jerry Powell, Executive Editor at Resource Recycling, gave a presentation titled Eureka! All plastics can be made degradable. A PDF of his presentation is available here.

The reason we’re sharing Jerry’s presentation with you is simple: ever since we first wrote about the growing confusion about what to do with plastic bottles — recycle or compost them — event directors have been bombarded with conflicting messages about the wonders of things like Coke’s new “plant bottle.”

With conflicting info, what’s a race director to do? Don’t mix degradable plastics with recyclable plastics. And, don’t believe all the marketing hype you may be hearing about degradable plastics.

One of the challenges many event directors face is how to deal with the permanent trash receptacles on many city streets. Our counsel is to somehow take them out of circulation for the day and direct folks to the nearest recycling station, where a volunteer can encourage people to put trash in the trash bin, recyclables in the recycling bin and compostables in the compost bin.

The photo to the left was taken at this year’s LIVESTRONG Austin Marathon, where the centralized recycling collection effort was quite successful. In fact, race day waste stats in Austin this year reveal a 79% year-over-year decrease in the amount on waste sent to the landfill. Of course, that was due to an integrated waste collection effort, not just the result of “capping” city trash cans. But, the “capping” effort has proven to be an effective component in the efficient collection of race day waste. If nothing else, it saves a lot of time and effort by green team volunteers, who would otherwise have to separate collected trash from recycling and compostables.

The photo below, from this year’s Credit Union Cherry Blossom Ten Mile Run, is a good example of an effective centralized recycling station. Clearly marked cardboard containers were dedicated to trash and food waste, while the ubiquitous Clearstream recycling bins accommodated recyclables. What you can’t see in this photo, other than the black pole in the middle of the photo, is the highly visible overhead signage that calls attention to the location of the recycling station.

We’ve got some new recycling station banners in the works that we’ll test at the Lilac Bloomsday Run next week. Stay tuned for photos and a critique.

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.

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

(more…)

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.)