BFBI is delighted to host a guest article by Adam Condon, a student of The Business of Nature Positive module at Trinity College Dublin – an exploration of more sustainable options to address the nature-related impacts of waste generation from energy products after marathon events.
A Nature-Positive Roadmap for Sports Nutrition:
Finish Line Fallacy
Three weeks after last October’s Dublin Marathon, I was walking my dog along the road when he nosed something silver out of the hedgerow. A crumpled energy gel wrapper, still sticky with maltodextrin, I grabbed out of his mouth. We hadn’t walked fifty metres before he found another. Then another. The race was long over. The waste was not.
The maths here is grim but worth doing. Around 25,000 runners line up each year, and most marathon fuelling plans call for roughly ten gels across the 42 kilometres. That is potentially up to 250,000 single-use wrappers dropped in a single morning across Dublin’s roads, parks, and canals. And that only counts race day. Factor in the training block, months of weekend long runs through the Phoenix Park, along the city centre, out past UCD, and the real number climbs far higher. Silver sticky wrappers sit in hedgerows, parks, and gardens, from July to October, waiting for the dogs, foxes, and wildlife that smell food and pull them loose.
These wrappers cannot be recycled. They are multi-material laminates, meaning, plastic film fused to aluminium foil, and no recycling site in the country will take them (Ellen MacArthur Foundation, 2016). Because they can’t be recycled, over time they fragment into microplastics that leach into soil and waterways, entering food chains and degrading the Dublin biodiversity we are trying to restore (UNEP, 2021). For a sport built on being outdoors, that is a genuinely sticky irony.
A Product That Depletes Nature Twice
The litter we can see is only half the problem. This product depletes nature twice: once when it is made, and again when it is tossed. Working through the sports nutrition value chain, I was shocked by how deep the upstream damage runs. The fuel inside most gels, maltodextrin, comes from intensive corn or wheat monocultures. These systems strip soil and organic matter, lean on synthetic nitrogen fertiliser, and generate nutrient runoff that leads to algal blooms and aquatic dead zones far from the farm (Tilman et al., 2002). The wrapper is worse. Its aluminium foil lining starts life as bauxite ore, extracted through open-pit mining that tears through tropical forests and leaves behind toxic red mud lagoons in place of thriving ecosystems (Power, Gräfe and Klauber, 2011).
Through a double materiality lens, gel brands carry nature-related risk at both ends of their value chain. Upstream, they depend on degraded ecosystems for raw materials. Downstream, the product waste directly harms local biodiversity. Under the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), companies are increasingly expected to disclose exactly these kinds of impacts and dependencies (EFRAG, 2024). Sports nutrition brands that ignore this two-way exposure are on borrowed time.
The “Design to Fail” Business Model
The current model is to sell-and-forget. Brands take high margins on the fuel and knowingly push the cost of the wrapper onto local councils and nature itself. The packaging design, at best, assumes that an exhausted runner, sticky-handed, oxygen-deprived, and kilometres from the nearest bin, will somehow hold onto multiple torn empty wrappers until they find one. That is not a realistic assumption. It is a product designed to fail.
The EU’s incoming Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR) turns this into a direct financial liability (European Commission, 2022). The PPWR introduces recyclability requirements, minimum recycled content thresholds, and Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) obligations rooted in the Polluter Pays principle. Brands still selling non-recyclable laminate packaging will face rising EPR levies, potential market restrictions, and inevitable reputational damage across the single market. The only question left is whether companies treat incoming regulation as a grudging cost or as impetus to improve their entire product.
“If You Sell the Fuel, Own the Wrapper”
A Nature Positive Roadmap
Nature Positive is not a slogan. The Nature Positive Initiative (2024) defines it as an ambitious goal referring to measurable outcomes that contribute to halting and reversing nature loss. In terms of sports nutrition, that means moving up the Mitigation Hierarchy. Instead of limiting damage at the end, we avoid the impact entirely through redesign, then actively restore the ecosystems the product touches along the way. The principle I propose is simple: if you sell the fuel, own the wrapper.
On the packaging side, viable alternatives already exist through emerging nature-based enterprises (NBEs). Notpla, a London-based startup, produces seaweed-based packaging that dissolves harmlessly in soil and water, captures and stores carbon in its structure during growth, and requires no arable land or freshwater to produce (Notpla, 2024). By addressing both climate change and biodiversity loss simultaneously, it offers a scalable solution to the polycrisis we face. They have already trialled it at the London Marathon. Picture a gel wrapper that, if dropped by a wrecked runner at mile twenty, breaks down into organic matter within weeks. The downstream biodiversity threat disappears.
On the ingredient side, brands can shift their maltodextrin sourcing towards regenerative agriculture systems that rebuild soil health, increase water retention, and restore microbial diversity (Rodale Institute, 2020). This turns the upstream crisis on its head: a nature-depleting input becomes a nature-restoring one. Major food companies are already investing in regenerative sourcing programmes. The sports nutrition sector has no excuse not to follow.
Runners care about the outdoors. They rely on the cultural ecosystem services, the recreation, amenity, and well-being values, provided by places like the Phoenix Park and the Grand Canal. A brand that delivers the first genuinely Nature Positive gel, compostable wrapper, regeneratively sourced fuel, does not just avoid a compliance headache. It earns lasting loyalty from a community that can spot greenwashing a mile off. Research consistently shows endurance athletes are willing to pay a premium for sustainably packaged products (Trivium Packaging, 2023). An extra fifty cents per gel to protect the route you love running is not a hard sell.
Fuel the Runner, Not the Route
The sports nutrition industry has a choice ahead of it. One path leads to rising EPR fees, regulatory scrambling, and more silver gel wrappers piling up in Ireland’s hedgerows. The other leads to material innovation, restored supply chains, and brand storytelling that stands out more than any ad campaign.
Event organisers can help force this change. The Dublin Marathon and other mass-participation races should mandate compostable packaging for all sponsored nutrition products by 2028. If your brand wants endorsement, its wrapper should not end up in the Grand Canal.
The finish line is not the end of a product’s lifecycle. It is where accountability starts. If you fuel the runner sustainably, runners will buy the fuel.
