Modern Athlete Magazine Issue 125, December 2019 | Page 31

abusive or personal comment. On that basis we can
open a constructive debate.
Worldwide Issue
The reality is that there currently is no single solution
to this challenge, and it’s a challenge that affects
every race in the world. It is impossible to provide
an accurate figure of our waste footprint in SA road
running, but we can calculate roughly that there are
1500 races per year, with 21km the average distance,
which in turn requires seven water points supplying
between 300ml to 450ml of water per runner, which
means we can estimate the following usage, per 1000
runners:
• 27 million plastic sachets or 42 million paper
cups
• 1.5 million plastic bottles from finish areas
• 4.2 million litres of water
That said, it is also important to put the impact of
races into context in as much as they are ‘small fry’ in
comparison to, say, airline flights. Around the world,
airlines transport 7.7 million passengers each day,
and that figure comes from 2011. Even assuming
each passenger has just one drink and uses one set
of knife, fork and teaspoon, that’s already 30 million
plastic items used and disposed of per day. And that
is just one single industry. Now think about fast food
and coffee outlets.
The second ‘innovative’ solution came from KZN
via Jolly Jumbo, who packaged juice lollies for sale
in stores. These plastic sachets brought several
advantages:
• Excellent for getting water from hand to mouth
and meeting hydration needs.
• A move from paper – at the time this was
seen as a major benefit, as trees were the
environmental focus then.
• Less likely to blow away in the wind before use.
• Able to be used for drinking and for cooling.
• Easy to keep cold.
The point is, just one day of air flight around the world
easily drowns out a whole year of running in South
Africa in terms of waste production, but that does not
mean we can ignore the problem, or should not do
something about it. Road running may be ‘small fry,’
but it attracts people of all ages and diversities, most
of whom tend to appreciate the environment, and
importantly, can have influence in many other spheres.
This is one of the key reasons why we must clean up
our sport.
These advantages quickly saw the sachet adopted
throughout SA road running, at a time when plastic was
seen as the future, and not a waste problem. In short,
plastic in its various forms was seen as the solution to
hydration, cooling / sponging and ‘saving the planet’ by
reducing the use of trees for paper cups.
What We’re Trying to Save?
Those of us with greying or receding hair will recall
that our first exposure to climate change and
environmental matters was the drive in the late 70’s
and early 80’s to save trees, and the rainforests in
particular, because they have a particularly beneficial
environmental impact. This drive was focused on
reducing the amount of paper production and printing.
Somehow this appears to have dropped from the
agenda, but the fact is that 3700 hectares of the
Amazon were deforested last year! It is still a major
concern, yet many of the people (correctly) fighting
single-use plastic are promoting the use of paper
cups. This may be considered a backward step for
more than one reason. • The primary concern was that using cups was
not efficient in preventing dehydration in the hot
and humid KZN conditions.
Dispensing water in paper cups requires more water
and more paper cups, and in the past, many paper
cups were not recyclable. That has changed, but it
was in the late 1980’s that cups were banned at water
tables in races in KZN for a number of reasons:
• Cups did not hold enough water, so more cups
were required.
• Cups were unstable because the base was
smaller than the opening at the top, and
were easily bumped over during pouring or
dispensing.
• Cups blew away in the wind and added to the
littering problem.
• Drinking from cups on the run was significantly
harder and more water was spilt than was
drunk. Two solutions were considered at that time. The first
option was small 250ml plastic bottles, which were
more stable and had a smaller mouth that allowed
more efficient consumption. Initially, these bottles
were ‘recycled’ by clubs by washing and storing
them, but soon the ‘throw away’ era began and new
bottles were bought for each race. This was also due
to concerns about hygiene. Around the same time, the
then-traditional sponging stations were removed for
similar hygiene reasons. Whereas previously sponges
had been used, carried or swapped over at tables,
bouts of ‘red eye’ and runners who would dip their
heads or even sit in water troughs put paid to the use
of sponges. This led to the use of more plastic bottles,
and they continued to be used for dispensing Coke at
the Comrades Marathon for many years.
In Search of Water
The concern over plastic waste has steadily been
growing over the past decade, but climate change has
reached a stage where water has become an even
bigger concern in many areas of the world, including
Southern Africa. Turn the clock back two years and
the Western Cape faced a water ‘Day Zero.’ This year,
Southern KZN, Zimbabwe and many other areas are
heading in the same direction.
In the Middle East, many countries have been using
desalination plants to overcome their water shortage.
This strategy was also used in the mid-80’s for
Comrades, due to the then drought in the province. A
number of portable swimming pools were set up on
the Durban beachfront to desalinate the Indian Ocean
water for use on Comrades day. (Ironically, this was
supplemented by tankers of water from the Cape.)
These droughts, followed by flood years, were seen as
unusual rather than regular, and few really appreciated
that these were the first signs of global climate
change. Today, water shortages are acknowledged
as perhaps the most serious effect of global warming
– it has even been said that future wars will be
fought over water supplies – and it has to be a major
consideration in this debate and the design of road
running refreshment stations.
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