A great day to run a marathon, or any other distance, at this year’s Martian Invasion of Races in Dearborn. Over 2,000 runners showed up to take on the nearby roads on a cool morning in bright sunshine, conditions which put the Green Team in a good mood!
Jenny and Liz get into the groove with their sporty antennae.
RF Events staffer Gary takes the “Hawaiian shirt” theme to a new level.
Our setup was similar to the last couple of years, with our main Zero Waste station near the registration and volunteer pavilion, with other stations on either end of the finish line area. We walked regularly between those two, picking up discarded items from the vendor and coffee truck area.
One welcome change was the park replacing their big yellow trash cans with green rolling carts, which made it easy for us to roll them out of the race area and then back at the end. Also, last year’s giant collection of trash bins near the finish line was gone, removing the need to cover them.
New this year was a Little Caesars Pizza truck, replacing the pancake station of previous years. This resulted in a drop in compost weight but we still filled two 96-gallon carts with pizza boxes and banana peels. Recycling was up about 15%, due mainly to an increase in cardboard. Landfill was cut by about half, from 9.4 lbs. to 4.5 lbs, meaning we got above 99 percent landfill diversion.
We had a good-sized Zero Waste team handling the morning rush and taking on the aid station bags in the afternoon. Thanks to Liz, new intern Jenny, and terrific volunteers Jeffrey, Lorie, David, and Zeina, we were on top of things and ready to be slammed with those aid station bags in the early afternoon. Unfortunately it was just David and me left to go through them, but he plowed right in, and we were done and outta there at 4:00.
Jeffrey (not me) and Lorie at station 2.
David takes on the afternoon aid station bag collection. (This is after we’d already processed a few bags.)
And many thanks to the finish line crew for bagging up their plastic wrap and keeping other waste out of it, and to the folks who unpackaged all the medals and gave us bags of all the plastic bags and wrap them came in.
The 10-yard recycling dumpster provided by Unlimited Recycling was just the right size, as we nearly filled it, and it was a bonus to have it covered and locked so people couldn’t throw trash in there. We left a large All Waste box next to it to capture anything people needed to throw away.
Finally, for some reason we collected about triple the amount of discarded clothing of last year (15 lbs. vs. 5 lbs.) even with the great weather. On the flip side, our “Free Stuff” box full of clothes was nearly cleaned out by the end of the day.
That’s about it. A welcome nice day and a smoothly run event!
Happy Planet Running 