Your World
BAG IT UP
I work part-time as a race director for an events company in the UK, staging many races predominantly on trails. I see many runners moving towards being ‘green’, using CamelBaks and collapsible cups to minimise the use of plastic cups, which is great. However, I’m constantly staggered at the growing trend of using gels and then discarding the empty wrappers on the route. I consistently raise this in my pre-race briefings and plead for this to stop, yet runners continue to discard these with no thought to the negative consequences. The wrappers are probably the most non-biodegradable substance known to man, with a half-life of decades, and are a blight on the countryside. They are the root cause of the majority of complaints post-event, and while we try, we cannot pick them all up.
The solution is simple: pin one side of an empty small plastic bag to your shorts or vest, dispose of your sticky gel packet in there and then dispose of the bag at the end of your run. Please, fellow runners, stop discarding empty gel packets on our trails and roads, and feel free to call out those who refuse to heed this simple courtesy. This is a beautiful country to run in; let’s keep it that way.
Hear, hear! And thanks for the excellent tip, Simon – runners, take note.
WIN!
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