The 2021 triathlon season is over at RF Events, and a successful one despite the ongoing uncertainty. And there was no doubt about the Zero Waste success, with every event achieving over 95 percent landfill diversion.
Of the four triathlons in the T-Rex series, this one is the most challenging because it gets dark before the event is over, making takedown more difficult and effective waste sorting impossible. So the aid station bags and the last-minute site cleanup trash must be taken care of the next day. At least the mosquitoes are there to keep us moving.
With volunteers “dropping likes flies” as a staff member put it, I was a one-man Green Team, so I made some adjustments. The food area station was set up in the shade instead of using a canopy, and I used a 96-gallon cart to carry its supplies and hold the collected waste at takedown. In the finish line water bottle area I picked up the plastic wrap and cardboard periodically instead of leaving a bag there, which saved digging out contamination later. Transition remains a work in progress, but the “All Waste” boxes at each end seem to work better than trying to set up a sorting station there.
Aid station bags were in fairly good shape, but the mixed cardboard/water jugs and loose items made for a sloppy loading. For future events I’ll ask if they can stack the cardboard and bag the other items. Also, somehow plastic forks wound up at the food table. We can recycle them, but they had to be carefully sorted from the compostable sporks we usually use.
Even with the challenges, we achieved another spectacular landfill diversion rate!
Happy Planet Running 
A good post on Sustainability. Thank you 😊