Conscious Consumers

Description

Here are some examples of us being conscious consumers and implementing environmentally sustainable practices at the Pay What You Want Tauranga Half Marathon:

1. We were one of the first event organisers to take the bold step of ditching a “race pack”.  While other events continued to dish up race packs filled with flyers and tiny samples in excess non-recyclable packaging, we simply stopped. And no one seemed to miss their 16g dry-balls muesli bar.
2. We pioneered the use of recyclable race numbers.
3. We choose Fairtrade bananas at our support stations and organic/fairtrade coffee vendors for our venue.
4. We choose compostable cups for all our aid stations and there are no single-use disposable plastic bottles for water or sports drink distributed at the finish line.
5. All our on-site vendors and sponsors are required to understand and agree to meet our environmental sustainability standards with regards to packaging and compostable consumables.
6. We ensure we have an adequate number of clearly labelled waste stations for landfill, recycling, and organic waste around the venue, and we then physically stick examples of which items go in each bin, on the bin lids. No excuses for not getting that sh*t right!
7. We employ a team of “Waste Watchers” to stand at the bins to politely educate people about what goes where (this also helps to avoid contamination of waste streams, and reduces further hand sorting post event).  But…because there will always be some people who are sustainability-challenged, there is always a need for some hand sorting of waste post event.  This final step ensures we divert everything away from landfill that we possibly can.    
8. Being seen to collect different waste streams is one thing, but we also ensure that we find the best homes for 100% of our waste streams post event.  This involves, for example, taking plastics #3-#7 outside of Tauranga where they can be processed, and getting our compostable cups commercially composted post event.
9. We only print signage for our events if the signage is going to be reusable year on year.
10. No finishers medals.  Yup. This one’s a hot topic for some, and there are people out there who have never, and will never, want to participate in our event because we don’t offer a finishers medal.  That’s their choice of course, but we have our reasons for not supplying. Our reasons are lengthy so click here for more…   

A little more on waste diversion…because we smash it out of the park (cough cough).

The Tauranga City Council encourages event organisers to have a target to divert 50% or more of their waste away from landfill.  Frankly, we don’t think that’s good enough, and our target has been 90%+ plus each year. Here’s how the event has performed since official audits began.  Audits have been conducted by the team @ EERST (Environmental Education for Resource Sustainability Trust).

We value the input and support from the team @ EERST (Environmental Education for Resource Sustainability Trust) to help us to continue to achieve our high waste diversion statistics. We constantly strive to reduce our environmental impact and we hope to influence and guide our participants, sponsors and stakeholders towards positive change.