At the adidas Manchester Marathon we are constantly striving to improve the sustainability of our event to reduce our impact on the environment. When entering the adidas Manchester Marathon, you will have the option to enter as a Green Runner, a new eco-friendly option where you can forego your finisher t-shirt and/or medal (we have two different Green Runner options) in favour of donating to support, The Ocean Cleanup.
You will receive all the benefits of the individual entry, however you can choose to either forego the t-shirt (and just receive the medal) or forego both the medal and t-shirt at the end of the event. This can be done by choosing this option at the checkout when selecting your entry.
Once you select this option we will then donate the money that would have been spent creating your t-shirt and/or medal to The Ocean Cleanup. You’re helping us to not create unwanted items at all, and also clean up our amazing oceans.
For the adidas Manchester Marathon 2023 we have had 1638 entrants opt out of receiving a finisher tee and 769 runners opt out of receiving a medal and a finisher t-shirt.
The Ocean Cleanup
Founded in 2013, The Ocean Cleanup was founded by 18-year old Dutchman Boyan Slat who was shocked by the amount of plastic he saw when scuba diving in Greece. Researching the plastic pollution problem, including the infamous Great Pacific Garbage Patch, Boyan held a TedX talk about how to rid the world’s oceans of plastic using technology, which ended up going viral and leading Boyan to drop out of school and found the movement. The team currently consists of 120 engineers, researchers, scientists, computational modelers, and supporting roles, working daily to rid the world’s oceans of plastic.
After many years of research, development, testing, and iteration, The Ocean Cleanup now has technologies to intercept plastic in rivers before it reaches the ocean (plastic flowing in rivers accounts for 80% of plastic in the ocean), and technologies to remove the plastic that is already out there—debris that has been building up for decades. Their creation of ‘interceptor’ machines, are 100% solar-powered and can extract plastic autonomously. The harvested plastic is then brought back to shore for recycling. Their very first product – The Ocean Cleanup Sunglasses (€199) – has been made using the catch of the ocean System 001/B aka “Wilson” in 2019. The revenue helps fund their ongoing cleanup efforts.
At adidas Manchester Marathon, funds from our Green Runner initiative will go towards helping The Ocean Cleanup reach their goal of a 90% reduction of floating ocean plastic by 2040. By choosing to be a Green Runner you (just you!) can make an impact on the state of the oceans and rivers worldwide.
Why have we introduced this?
Firstly, you asked, we delivered! We have received feedback from many of our previous runners that whilst they love the sentimentality of a finisher t-shirt, the truth simply is that many don’t wear them once they get home and they get thrown away after a few months. Often we find at the end of our events that many runners refuse to take their t-shirt because they know they won’t wear them – therefore we want to spare the wastage where we possibly can.
ReRun, a community interest company founded with the purpose of prolonging the life of running clothes and equipment, have these astounding facts:
Every year it is estimated that 300,000 tonnes of used clothing goes to landfill in the UK. That’s the equivalent of 544,311,000 Olympic gold medals being chucked away.
Currently over 5% of the UKs total annual carbon and water footprints result from clothing consumption. Extending the average life of clothes by 3 months would result in a 5 to 10 % reduction of their carbon, water and waste footprints, extending the life by 9 months would result in a 20 to 30 % reduction.
In the average UK household nearly a third of clothes haven’t been worn in the last year. That’s over £1000 per household, £30 billion of unused clothes in the UK.
60% of runners have more than 10 race t-shirts, and these amount to 60 – 65% of all unwanted clothes received by Re-run.
Whilst we know this doesn’t apply to all of you, and we do love receiving the pictures of you out on your training runs in your Manchester Marathon tees, we want to show our commitment by offering those who do not want the t-shirt a different option.
Our approach has always been to reduce, re-use and recycle wherever possible, we realise that there are many different aspects to be worked on and improved over time which we will endeavour to do so.
