At the adidas Manchester Marathon we are constantly striving to improve the sustainability of our event to reduce our impact on the environment. When entering the adidas Manchester Marathon, you will have the option to enter as a Green Runner, an eco-friendly option where you can forego your finisher t-shirt and/or medal (we have two different Green Runner options) in favour of donating to support, City of Trees.

You will receive all the benefits of the individual entry, however you can choose to either forego the t-shirt (and just receive the medal) or forego both the medal and t-shirt at the end of the event. This can be done by choosing this option at the checkout when selecting your entry.

Once you select this option we will then donate the money that would have been spent creating your t-shirt and/or medal to City of Trees. You’re helping us to not create unwanted items at all.

At the adidas Manchester Marathon 2024, 7% of participants signed up as a Green Runner – a total of 2,152 participants.

City of Trees

City of Trees plant trees, look after trees and promote a culture of trees across Greater Manchester. They are a City of Trees – trees to create better, greener places; to boost health and wellbeing; to enhance green skills; and to tackle the climate and biodiversity emergency. A community forest and registered charity, they plant trees for and with the people of Greater Manchester, all with the help of brilliant volunteers and an ever-growing network of communities, businesses and organisations.

They’re rooted here in Greater Manchester, the place they live and work. They are proud to call Greater Manchester home and are passionate about making our region even better, one tree at a time. They are a climate emergency service, planting trees to tackle and adapt to our changing climate and boost local nature recovery. The trees they plant will help to make Greater Manchester more resilient to a range of environmental challenges including air quality, flood risk and extreme heat.

They’re spreading the word and nurturing a culture that values our trees and woods. Find out more about City of Trees.

Why have we introduced this?

Firstly, you asked, we delivered! We have received feedback from many of our previous runners that whilst they love the sentimentality of a finisher t-shirt, the truth simply is that many don’t wear them once they get home and they get thrown away after a few months. Often we find at the end of our events that many runners refuse to take their t-shirt because they know they won’t wear them – therefore we want to spare the wastage where we possibly can.

ReRun, a community interest company founded with the purpose of prolonging the life of running clothes and equipment, have these astounding facts:

1. Every year it is estimated that 300,000 tonnes of used clothing goes to landfill in the UK. That’s the equivalent of 544,311,000 Olympic gold medals being chucked away.
2. Currently over 5% of the UKs total annual carbon and water footprints result from clothing consumption. Extending the average life of clothes by 3 months would result in a 5 to 10 % reduction of their carbon, water and waste footprints, extending the life by 9 months would result in a 20 to 30 % reduction.
3. In the average UK household nearly a third of clothes haven’t been worn in the last year. That’s over £1000 per household, £30 billion of unused clothes in the UK.
4. 60% of runners have more than 10 race t-shirts, and these amount to 60 – 65% of all unwanted clothes received by Re-run.

Whilst we know this doesn’t apply to all of you, and we do love receiving the pictures of you out on your training runs in your Manchester Marathon tees, we want to show our commitment by offering those who do not want the t-shirt a different option.

Our approach has always been to reduce, re-use and recycle wherever possible, we realise that there are many different aspects to be worked on and improved over time which we will endeavour to do so.

You can find out more about our CARE Policy here.