Here’s a timely tip from my friend Jim Gerweck, Editor-at-Large for Running Times:

With primary season just around the corner, methinks there will be a lot of corplast looking for a second life …

Hmmm, I wonder how many environmentally aware pols will use bioboard instead of corplast?

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!

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:

Last weekend, I gave a presentation to Road Race Management’s annual meeting of race directors. The topic was Greening Your Event, and the theme of my talk was Catch The Wave. I’ve posted the presentation on SlideShare.net and encourage you to take a look.

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.

As a follow-up to the How Green Is Your Event workshop I led last April, my friends at Road Race Management asked me to compile a Guide To Greener Running Events. The booklet is now available to order, and I hope the race directing community will find it to be a useful compendium of trends and ideas for making a running event–or any participant sporting event, for that matter–more environmentally responsible.

Highlights of the booklet include a summary of the results of a survey of some 100 race directors about their environmental policies and practices as well as a snapshot of what 29 different races are doing to reduce their environmental impact.

I hope you’ll check out the descriptive blurb on Road Race Management’s Web site.

By the way, if you wanted to attend my green events workshop last April, but could not, please note that I’ll be speaking on the topic again at Road Race Management’s Annual Race Directors’ Meeting in Hollywood Beach, Florida on Friday, November 7, 2008. You can learn more about the conference and download a PDF of the meeting brochure here.

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:

(more…)

Lee and I strive to provide valuable counsel to participant sporting events that are trying to clean up their act. But we’re far from being the only experts in this field. So when we discover useful resource materials, we’re pleased to share them with our clients and visitors to this Web site.

In 2002, Robin Hawley, an old friend and former colleague of Lee’s developed a recycling guide for Portland, Oregon’s Race For The Cure. Robin has worked extensively in the recycling field since receiving her Masters in Public Administration from Portland State University in 1998. She worked on the commercial recycling program for the Office of Sustainable Development for the City of Portland from 2000 until 2003, then joined the regional government, Metro, and took over responsibility for improving business recycling in the Portland region from 2003 to 2005. During that time she was also the lead individual responsible for event day recycling for the Susan G. Komen Foundation Race For The Cure, in Portland, Oregon. This event, with over 42,000 participants, achieved notable recovery while Robin was overseeing the recycling operations, recovering 72% of their waste while only landfilling 28%! Ms. Hawley is currently employed by Ecos Consulting, running the Program Management Office.

Thanks to Robin, here’s the link to a PDF that’s chock full of tips and stats for those of you who are trying to set up or improve your event’s waste management systems: race-for-the-cure-recycling-guide.pdf

In the preceding post, I mentioned that there’s a movement afoot to reduce the impact of running events, triathlons, bike races and the like. One of the driving forces behind this nascent movement is the Council for Responsible Sport.

Jeff Henderson and Jonathan Eng launched the Council in September 2007 with the thought that the broader world of sport could do with a little cleaning. To that end, they’ve developed a draft set of standards for green event certification which can be viewed here. The key word in the previous sentence is the word DRAFT. Jeff and Jonathan are sincere in wanting these standards to be objective, transparent and inclusive and, thus, are encouraging folks to comment on the draft standards using this form.

I’ve already let them know how I think the standards should be tweaked. Why don’t you take a few minutes to do so as well?