Written by Shelley Villalobos, managing director of the Council for Responsible Sport after attending the 2019 Bank of America Chicago Marathon
Early morning light shines on sculptor Richard Hunt’s ‘We Will’ the morning of the 2019 Bank of America Chicago Marathon—an event that demonstrates one of the most sophisticated sustainability programs of a large sporting event anywhere.
Wind gusts were surprisingly infrequent the morning of the 2019 edition and the 42nd staging of the Bank of America Chicago Marathon. The event alert level was set to green, meaning conditions were good—it may as well also have been indicative of the entire weekend of related events that were consciously planned to be ‘green’.
This is a story of the growing ecological awareness and consequential actions planned into the production of the Bank of America Chicago Marathon, and the success it’s found in seeking to make the event agree with nature’s principles, rather than act in spite of them.
All of the 45,000 participants registered for one of the world’s largest marathons must visit the Abbott Health & Fitness Expo held Thursday-Saturday of event weekend at Chicago’s gigantic exhibition facility, McCormick Place, to claim their bib number. People flocked via low-carbon emissions transit options from shuttles provided by organizers, to the nearby Metra electrified rail (a stop exits directly into the exhibition center), and the mass transit CTA network. Lyft, Uber and Taxis abounded; parking did not. While there, guests had the option to peruse some 175 vendor booths, with most selling wares, gear, registration to other events and endurance sport miscellany.
One booth wasn’t selling anything, though. Instead, volunteers invited visitors to take a short detour, walking a footpath informing them of three key initiatives that seek to reduce the environmental impact of the event by ‘closing the loop’ on necessary event materials; that is, making useful things out of materials that would otherwise be considered waste after one short use—cups, space blankets (Heatsheets), and water bottles. This more “circular design” shows a sophisticated approach to materials management that is being employed more and more by large consumer goods corporations like Unilever, for example, but which has yet to be widely adopted in the endurance event sector.
Cups to Soil
As Chicago marathoners weave through 29 unique neighborhoods, runners stay hydrated by drinking six ounce servings of water or Gatorade delivered in small compostable cups at 20 ‘aid stations’ along the route. While 2.4 million cups were on hand, around 1.8 million are used each year at the marathon, according to the event’s sustainability manager, Cat Morris.
A display shows how the elements and nutrients contained in cups, banana peels and apple cores collected during the Chicago Marathon are turned back into soil via composting. The soil in this display is from organic waste from last year’s marathon.
In 2017, a slightly more expensive wax-lined compostable cup was introduced at four aid stations to see if it would be a viable replacement to the non-recyclable, nor biodegradable one that had been used in recent history. It worked fine—no complaints—so the following year, 75 percent of the aid stations used the cup. For the first time in 2019, all the aid stations served water in cups made from bamboo that could breakdown in a commercial compost operation and be turned back into soil along with the banana peels and apple core remains of the ‘runner refresh’ area after the finish line.
The resulting nutrient-rich soil is then donated to the Chicago Parks District and community gardens, to amend the city’s green spaces. Without this program, those million cups would go straight to the landfill, where they would sit indefinitely.
Blankets to Boards
If you’ve ever been to a marathon in a cool locale, you’ve likely encountered the insulating foil blankets commonly known as ‘space blankets’ or ‘heat sheets’ that runners use to maintain their body temperature before and after running. And while it would be arguably irresponsible not to provide them, organizers and runners alike often bemoan the creation of yet another source of waste destined for the landfill after one short, albeit necessary, use.
One provider of the blankets, called Heatsheets, did something about it and found mutual benefit through a collaboration with a company that makes composite board products—Trex—that could use the blankets in its product when mixed with sawdust. The result of the ‘Blankets to Boards’ program is a manufactured board that is durable, long-lasting and water-resistant while being sourced from post-consumer material.
It takes about 500 Heatsheets to make enough Trex board to build a bench like the one pictured here
So, with the help of volunteers and collection sites in the post-race areas and popular exit points, about 5,500 Heatsheets were collected in 2019, with plans to donate a park bench made from the resulting Trex boards to Healthy Hood, a non-profit community studio with a community garden space located on the course. The Chicago Marathon began the bench donation program in 2018, providing benches to local communities and neighborhood public spaces impacted by the event, with Skinner School receiving the first bench. Approximately 500 Heatsheets are needed to produce a bench.
Why do organizers make these efforts when it would be easier and cheaper not to? Maybe they realize that in nature, there is no waste—everything is metabolized and re-integrated. Perhaps they even recognize that humanity is experiencing a time when feedback from living ecosystems is showing with ever-greater scientific clarity that things are amiss in nature as compared with recent history. The human population grew exponentially in the span of barely a century—we’re at 7.6 billion and counting.
That growth has fueled a mind-boggling demand for material supplies from natural resources, and an imperfect economic system to deliver that supply. If nature cycles its waste, shouldn’t we too? After all, we humans are not separate from nature, but rather, integrally reliant upon it for our very existence. The idea of following nature’s examples to design human systems is referred to as biomimicry, or, mimicking the way natural ecosystems adapt and survive.
With such understanding of the cyclical nature of the world, it is fitting that the organizers of such a large event would seek to supply its need demanding as few raw materials from nature as possible, and instead using goods that had reached the end of their usefulness and were ready to be transformed into something newly useful. That is the basis of the bottles to fabric program, the marathon’s third key circular program.
Bottles to Fabric
Marathoners need hydration. No one denies that. But there is a water distribution challenge when it comes to delivering that hydration to over 45,000 people who just ran 26.2 miles as quickly as possible. Enter the water bottle. The bane of water bottles is not their contents, nor the convenience with which they deliver it, it’s the energy and climate-change contributing oil they’re made from, and that they’re designed for single-use. Add to that poor infrastructure for recycling. Only about nine percent of plastic ever gets recycled and about 13 million tons enter the world’s oceans every year according to Clean Seas, which refers to plastic recycling as an ‘underperforming sector ripe for a remake.’
Green Team volunteers keep the waste streams properly sorted as guests place their discards directly on the table. When striving towards ‘zero waste,’ this method often proves to be one of the most effective.
Around one hundred Green Team volunteers help at designated ‘Zero Waste Stations’ to help properly sort whatever waste participants have to discard at the finish area—compost for organic materials and cups, recycling for plastic bottles and cans (finishers were offered a beer in an aluminum can from Goose Island Brewery), and trash for anything else, like energy bar wrappers. Over 50 tons of material is diverted from the landfill at the Bank of America Chicago Marathon each year.
To continue to adjust the event to align with nature’s no-waste principle, organizers arranged to ensure that the Nike tech shirt participants receive is made from 100% post-consumer recycled polyester fiber. Nike is increasingly incorporating the material into its supply chain, and has partnered with the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, a leading ‘circular economy’ think tank, to “explore new business models focused on reuse and regeneration.”
Worth noting is that additionally, even the ‘zero waste station’ signage itself was made from recycled polyester it calls ‘ReView’ by a company called Hightech Signs.
Bottles are source-separated at the Bank of America Chicago Marathon, providing a clean ‘stream’ of material for manufacturers to purchase and turn into new valuable items, like the polyester tech shirt participants received this year made from yarn spun from 100% post-consumer recycled plastic (as shown in center).
As visitors finished their walking tour of the marathon’s journey to sustainability at the Abbott Health & Fitness Expo, they were greeted with a classic booth favorite—a spin wheel. The wheel was adorned with material management characterizations, ‘compost’, ‘recycle’ and ‘landfill’, but the lucky ones ‘reduce’ and ‘reuse’ earned folks something special. A commemorative Bank of America Chicago Marathon stainless steel reusable straw set by Chicago-based startup Swzle, so they can be part of the solution by employing a waste-free tactic in their daily lives. Reducing the use of single-use plastic straws helps reduce demand—currently Americans use 500 million plastic straws every day.
Symbolic of the current ‘throwaway culture,’ Americans use and discard 500 million plastic straws every day—carrying a reusable one is a simple tactic that can help drive a change in common culture towards greater awareness of the impacts of our lifestyles on the ecosystems we rely on.
A majority of visitors were genuinely enthusiastic when they found out about these circular initiatives, and many were impressed. ‘I had no idea’ and, ‘wow, that is awesome’ were common responses.
What would happen if all the 45,000 participants of the Bank of America Chicago Marathon were to take something they learned at the expo booth and begin to apply it to their lifestyles and places of work? Further, what would happen if major marathons all over the world began to invest in their own circular programs and use their spheres of influence and purchasing to steer supply toward a more circular economic model that better respects and more closely mimics nature? That notion is a key pillar of the Responsible Sport movement.
The Council for Responsible Sport celebrates the leadership demonstrated by the 2019 Bank of America Chicago Marathon by awarding its Inspire Evergreen level certification—the highest attainable level of recognition for dedication to the best practices in responsible sport as found in the version 4.2 Responsible Sport standards. The standards contain 61 best practices—Inspire Evergreen means that organizers have achieved 90% or more of the individual best practices and have earned certification multiple consecutive times.
The Bank of America Chicago Marathon sustainability program is not limited to the three circular stories featured here. Read about other initiatives like vendor engagement, clothing and food donation, and charity programs here. Or read a recent feature about the event by GreenSports Blog here.
And finally, as a point of inspiration, it would be shameful not to mention how Kenyan athlete Brigid Kosgei decisively broke the world record for the fastest woman marathon time at this year’s Chicago Marathon, beating Briton Paula Radcliffe’s record set in London 16 years ago by a staggering 81 seconds with a time of 2:14:04.
Bank of America Chicago Marathon (Photo courtesy: Chicago Event Management)