Here we outline some of the things we’re doing to reduce our impact for the 2022 race season and beyond.
Races
In the last couple of years, we’ve moved all our races to be cupless. This means that you need to remember to bring with you something to drink out of, which we can refill as needed at the aid stations. If you forget, we do have cups available at the shop by race admin, which you can take with you on the course. You can buy a re-usable cup in advance here.
We’re also encouraging the use of bib clips instead of safety pins where possible, or the reuse of safety pins you already have. We sell our own event clips in the shop, but you need to remember to bring something with you to our events to attach your number to your top, as we won’t be providing safety pins.
Talking of race numbers, we have a couple of additional changes here too. First, we have made our physical race number bibs smaller in size. This means that we can print more numbers per sheet of Tyvek, which reduces waste. It also means that for races where we send the numbers out, they can be sent as a normal size letter.
We’re also adopting dynamic bib assignment at race admin. Which is a fancy pants way of saying we assign your race number to you when you arrive to collect your number, rather than having to assign all the numbers in advance and print off lists – it’s more efficient for our race admin team and saves on paper waste too. Win win!
We will be continuing with our option to opt-out of your goody bag if you want to, and instead donate that portion of your entry fee to a local eco project. If you choose this option on your entry, you will still get a medal, but you won’t get your extra goodies. You can find out more about this project here.
Finally, we’ve also made a decision on our squeakies going forwards. We feel that these squeakies are an unnecessary use of plastic materials. Not only that, they have to travel a really long way to get to us, which doesn’t really feel right – using long-distance couriers just to deliver massive boxes of plastic squeaky cows is probably not hugely planet friendly. Therefore, we won’t be ordering them anymore and we’re actively looking for a better, but still fun, option for our future Frolics. You can find out more about this here.
On-site waste
We work with a very good waste management company, who pick through our waste and separate it out for recycling to help minimise our waste that ends up in landfill. Keep an eye out for the team from Junk-o-saurus at the next event.
The top team at the Lovestation™ are very good at ensuring there is minimal food wasted at events, and we will continue decanting into bowls that can be reused as well as recycling all the packing food comes in where possible.
We have successfully reduced the plastic packing on our clothing, and all the boxes it comes in are reused.
The suppliers that attend our events have great incentives too. For example, when we had Totally Wonderfuel with us at events they had a great #borrowacup scheme. And our current supplier Grounded Coffee has spent hours converting George to be able to trade anywhere without using a generator!
Our old medal ribbons are taken to our local Dorset Scrapstore, where they can be repurposed for lots of different projects. We’ve also started to take excess metal to a local metal worker who operates out of the farm that we use for the Cider Races. These metal scraps are finding new life as windchimes – we hope to be able to show you some of these soon!
As you can see, we’re trying to do everything we can, and will continue to keep you updated on our progress as we make changes going forwards.