Trail and ultra running races and events went cupless more than a decade ago. Within the span of a year or two, the majority of events asked you to bring a reusable cup, usually one that could hold hot liquids or be packed away in your vest and pulled out for aid stations.
It's now a normal part of trail and ultramarathon races and I have a couple of reusable cups that i've been using for years, a silicone one and a hard one and take them with me for all my races and even my own long distance adventures.
I actually can't really remember when it happened it was that long ago, but it did and it was a great positive step for the sport trail running, a sport and hobby that is based on nature and it's just how things work now, no one questions the decision and rightfully so.
In the last year, you've probably seen road marathon races going cupless, it's taken them over a decade to catch up, later is better than never I suppose.
The big win here is that some marathons are literally tens of thousands deep in terms of participants, all hitting a handful of aid stations along their route, and that would make up hundreds of thousands of cups, just for one event. Paris was the first major marathon to take this step this year, more than 50,000 runners on the course now all have to do what us trail runners have been doing for a decade and bring their own reusable cups or soft flasks along to get water and their hydration needs.
There are other major marathons trialling this and every running website on the planet has covered this issue in great detail.
Meanwhile, nobody is talking about the single-use, multi layered and laminated plastic energy gel and chew packets that are taken at the exact same events, whether it's trail running, ultra running or road marathons.
A road marathon at 60g of carbs per hour and a 4 hour finish will mean 8 gel or chew packets are used for this event. It has over 50,000 participants, that equates to 400,000 single-use energy gels or chew packets used just once and then binned, ending up in landfill.
A single 100km mountain ultra can also generate thousands of these wrappers and packets in just one event, we head off in to nature and create waste to consume a small amount of sugar every 30 minutes.
If a single runner from UTMB CCC which has over 2000 competitors takes one gel every hour and finishes the race in 20 hours, a mid pack finish time, thats 40,000 single-use energy gels and chew packets used just once and then binned after, ending up in landfill.
This is a conservative look at this race as most will take a gel or chew more than once per hour, usually twice and can finish in upwards of 28 hours for this race, which is 8 hours longer than my estimation. We could make the claim here that this one race contributes 80,000 single-use gel and chew packets to landfill.
To continue this theme and if everybody used multilayered laminated packaging shown below, that would be 640,000 layers of plastic and aluminium foil from just one race, thats more than half a million.
And then we haven't added every single by UTMB race people participate in throughout the world, and the other final races in Chamonix at the end of August each year; ETC, OCC, UTMB, TDS, etc.
If you do the maths, these single-use packets that have quite large impacts on the planet in their production are most definitely the biggest issue in running when waste is concerned.
So why has there been virtually no discussion about this issue?
A pile of cups doesn't rock the boat, there is no brand or product name behind the cup, so removing them doesn't question the status quo of trail, road running and ultramarathons, which is product and pros.
The narrative of our sport and hobby is owned by the very brands that are creating the waste, so they will never be questioned, which means the lead cause of single-use waste in our sport and hobby, that is based on nature, will never be fixed.
We've sent this story to running, endurance and outdoor media sites more than 300 times this year and nobody has picked it up yet. No one thinks or wants to say, "this is a problem".
So we're starting the conversation ourselves and created a reusable solution to this single-use waste problem, DirtBags.
The worlds first and purpose made, reusable energy gel, chew and powder packets to replace single-serving fuel options where their packaging ends up in the landfill.
This is the first article in "Trail Running Shouldn't Cost The Earth". A new section to For The Trail where we'll dig into the 3 pillars of this project: the affordability of trail, mountain and ultramarathons, environmental issues like this one that the industry don't want to cover and celebrating nature, after all, without nature, we wouldn't be trail running.
