Running Goes Green
Race directors and running industry entrepreneurs are discovering ways to encourage runners to become more eco-friendly, from trash removal during marathons, to generating electricity through movement; running is going green.
The Scotiabank Vancouver Half-Marathon sees over 7,000 runners grab, sip from and toss tens of thousands of energy drink f illed paper cups, suck on and discard gels and devour post-race snacks. The massive clean up required led the organizers to start thinking differently about their environmental impact from the event . For the 2013 race, they part nered wit h rec ycling company Green Chair, which provides sustainable waste management services throughout the metro Vancouver area.
Environmental expert for Green Chair Nicki Casley says that they achieved a 98 per cent diversion rate, meaning that they sent nearly all of the half-marathon’s waste to recycling facilities. They only took 50 kg of garbage (about four bags) to a landfill.
As race director Clifton Cunningham explains, he and his team are going to take their green initiatives a step further in 2014.
“We’re looking at ways to improve over last year in a measurable area like in waste diversion or dealing with a certain hard-to-recycle item,” Cunningham says. “And we’re looking at alternative fuel vehicles to be used around the race, switching our lead vehicle over to a hybrid, getting better use of mass transit to get to the starting line and promoting car-sharing programs as well.”
Carnegie Mellon University graduates Matt Stanton and Hahna Alexander, who founded SolePower, are the first tech-savvy entrepreneurs to introduce a practical shoe insole that converts kinetic energy to usable power. Soon runners worldwide will have the potential to generate up to 1,500 mAh of electricity, which is enough to charge a smartphone.
When asked about the inspiration behind their idea, Alexander explains that it stems from a university class where they were assigned to “create a product that solves a problem for students.”
“We were sick of our phones dying and a lot of people in our group were athletes and they either ran or they walked home at night,” says Alexander. “Our original idea was to put a light on the shoe. But when we demoed it, we realized that the power generation component was much more universally applicable.”
With an anticipated release date this summer, beta testing is well underway, which has focused primarily on hikers “so that we can knock out all of the weather resistance issues,” which so far has included a two-day, 32k backpacking trip through Raccoon Creek State Park in Pennsylvania. In addition to the practical use of the insole, Stanton and Alexander also have humanitarian ambitions, including generating electricity for villages and towns in the developing world who otherwise would go without. “There are a lot of people living around the world without electricity that use kerosene for lighting, which has several health and safety hazards and that isn’t very sustainable,” Stanton says. They aren’t the first to put kinetic energy from runners to good use. The Paris Marathon, which is the second-largest marathon in the world, took huge strides this year to generate its own electricity in the form of tiles that occupied a 25-metre section of the course that transferred the kinetic energy of more than 50,000 runners’ footsteps to a battery to meet the energy needs of the marathon.
“The ambition is that people will request and utilize the generated electricity by the runners,” says Jo Hart, senior vice president, Solution Marketing at Schneider Electric, the title sponsor of the marathon. “And those runners will also be able to vote and decide what projects the electricity is used on, like a housing project, or a school – somewhere that needs it more than those who were running.”
The tiles, which were created from recycled tires, generated five-kilowatt hours of electricity, which could power 1,880 mobile phones, an led light bulb for 940 hours, or, most importantly, it could light up a village for an entire day.