Keeping Ealing Half Marathon Green

Do you have suggestions for cutting plastics and waste?

Organisers of Ealing’s award winning Half Marathon say they’re doing all they can to try and ensure the race is environmentally friendly.

It follows calls for plastics to be cut and to introduce water pods instead of bottles for the thousands of runners, as in evidence at this year’s London Marathon.

However EHM Events Director Sandra Courtney says, ‘’ London Marathon only used the pods at one station, they were not a replacement for their water stations. Without a bottle equivalent solution, having pods would not be safe for runners, there needs to be a larger option other than pods for hydration safety and also medical safety for our runners until a better solution is found. Runner safety is always going to be key.

"Pods won't cut it if a runner goes down with heat issues. The small water bottles are easy to transport and to pour over necks and wrists of over heating runners and have on hand for medical issues. You can't do this with pods.

"We are very proud to have been recycling our plastic bottles since our very first race in 2012 before it became a known topic, to us it was always important. Our volunteers bag the bottles in clear recycle bags which are collected by Amey and taken to be sorted and then recycled. We only buy PET1 bottles which are recyclable.

"Reducing our plastic bottle use is something we look at into all the time, we recycle our bottles plus we use the smallest possible size bottle we can find (these have been reduced in size by over 50% since our first race) we are committed to keeping our impact to a minimum.

"We would love to have all runners bring their own refillable water bottles and supply filling station around the course but that is also not practical at this stage.

"To aid our commitment to reducing waste we do not give out goodie bags at the finish, these are often filled with flyers and unwanted items. Runners are given plenty of goodies but they simply carry them out of the finish funnel. We also don't do adult finisher t-shirts as feedback has been that they are generally not wanted and you have so many left over so not supplying them reduces our carbon footprint and no transportation to get them to the race is needed.

"We will always be looking for the safe replacement of our water bottles, we won't stop doing that as we want to add to our hard work at continuing to think outside the box to keep Ealing Half Marathon one of the leaders in reducing waste.

"If anyone can help with this we would absolutely love to speak to them so do get in contact with us. ‘’

June 26, 2019