UK ULTRA SUSTAINABILITY

With sustainability so important to all our futures, we try to do everything we can to help reduce the impact of our events on the environment. We have committed to making the event as sustainable as we possibly can, while maintaining the high-quality event experience that everyone involved deserves.

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We have the following in place:

-The biggest way events can reduce emissions and their Carbon Footprint is from travel. We have updated all but one of our events now to be single looped races where the start and finish are in the same place. Point to point races create an awful lot of emissions which we wanted to cut out. This greatly reduces the emissions from travel, and almost all our events are now very close to a train station which is a much more preferred form of travel to reduce emissions. The one race that is still a point to point, we offer a bus service from the finish to the start line to reduce emissions.

-We promote sustainable travel in the pre event information by asking people to car share where possible, making events close to train stations and asking them to cycle or even where possible.

-We have recently cut out offering single use energy nutrition packets at our race Aid Stations such as gels, chews, bars and electrolyte sachets. These essentially all go straight to landfill. We have replaced these with more homemade tray bake goods, and will be working with company Dirt Bags who provide reusable, compostable packets to help carry these, other nutrition items out on the routes. They are even great for carrying items such as mobile phones, money etc to keep them dry. More information on DirtBags can be seen below.

-We have tried to make all our Aid Station food either vegetarian or vegan and have achieved this with all but one menu item which remains as it is so popular!

-We have eliminated plastic cups and bottled water from our events and made foldable cups/soft flasks mandatory for the runners

-Any cardboard from our office is recycled

-No race information is sent in the post but is all done online. Race Numbers are not sent out in the post either but only collectable at registration on the day.

-We have asked our suppliers to remove plastic packaging from merchandise and have now made our online shop mainly pick up from events where possible reducing the emissions from postage. We do still offer this but almost all of our online purchases are done by entrants that collect them at the events saving on postage.

-We now have recycling bins at the start/finish of our events and also go through all bags of waste from the Aid Stations after the events to separate the rubbish from recycling.

-We have a fantastic artist hand design our medals and this artwork will always remain. Changing medals every year might seem nice however, no matter what any race company tells you, there is always lots of waste from this and from the research we have done, old medals cannot be recycled in this country. Using the same design allows us to reuse medals continuously every year. This means of course no dates are on the medals. 

-We don't offer free finisher t-shirts but do allow runners to purchase them. This reduces t-shirt waste as only people that really want one will choose to. The t-shirts have again been designed by the same artist that does our medals and this same design gets reused every year reducing waste of continuously having a new design. We have changed these designs occasionally where routes have changed and we have also changed suppliers, but on the whole they remain the same every year

-We are committed to using local suppliers and contractors for the events and buy the majority of supplies locally where possible.

-We have taken away plastic ribbons normally used for route marking and replaced them with a recyclable water proof paper design that is very robust and gets reused over and over at our events. We also only use reusable cable ties for signage out on the routes and at Race HQ

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