Running outdoors is a great way to get in touch with nature–or for nature to get in touch with you. So it’s only, well, natural that runners would want to do their part to protect the environment. Our individual training runs at home probably don’t do much damage, as long as we don’t litter, but larger events like marathons certainly have an impact. Even if all the garbage produced is cleaned up by volunteers (thank you all!), that’s still a lot of trash. And that’s not the only way a marathon might negatively affect the environment: think of all the pollution involved in transporting people to and from the event, the power running everything at the start and finish, etc.
Fortunately some organizers are working on making marathons a little more green. Take the Madison Marathon, for example. Just today I received an email about next year’s race that included this bit of information:
The Madison Marathon is a Runners World Green Race and we’re working to go greener. We have always handed out goody bags to each participant and, last year, we made sure these bags were biodegradable. Recently, many companies have been cutting back on the number of product samples they have been handing out, resulting in a lot of paper fliers ending up in race bags. The staff here is concerned that this doesn’t exactly fit our “green” mission. So, we are considering doing away with goody bags and offering any product samples at the race expo. Gear check bags will still be available, but they will be recyclable/biodegradable.
I think this is a great idea and I hope they go ahead with it. Most of the fliers in my race bags go unread, and if I or my wife do read them we almost always forget about them soon after.
Of course, this is only one of a number of ways that races can go green.