Monday, November 12, 2007

Zero Waste results from Boulder UCI races













Back to the race weekend that started it all in 2006 - the CLIF BAR Development Team started its Zero Waste events work at last year's US Gran Prix Series events in Longmont and Boulder.

Race promoters Rus Kappius and Chris Grealish were really keen on the idea of reducing the environmental impact of their events, and the team learned a lot working with Eco-Cycle on how to make sure as little trash as possible is generated at the races. For our first effort with the USGP races, we achieved a 74% diversion rate - so, only 26% of the total materials collected ended up going to the landfill.

Not bad, but we wanted to do better, and spread the idea of low-impact events as much as we could.

This year, we've partnered with the US Gran Prix of Cyclo-Cross Series and Crank Brothers to make the entire USGP Series Zero Waste, which is a huge task for races occurring in Louisville, KY, Trenton, NJ, and Portland, OR.

Locally, we're helping the BoulderRacing Cyclo-Cross Series go Zero Waste, and of course we were back out at Boulder's biggest weekend of racing, thanks to Chris Grealish's enthusiasm and support for Zero Waste events.

Over the Nov. 3-4 weekend, with the large UCI events (Redline Cup on Sat, Boulder Cup on Sun), the team worked hard to improve on our 2006 Zero Waste results.

The two races combined had a diversion rate of 80.3%. Resources saved: 2.8 trees, 819 kilowatt hours, 755 gallons of water and diverted 2320 pounds of compostable materials from the landfill.

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TEAM CLIF BAR is working to fight climate change