It sure would encourage people to use it up before the expiration date.

can have biodegradable kits – that would solve the white shorts problem.

sounds like an easy excuse to pollute ….

So it’s nice to see Milram looking into ways to alleviate the issue

But the problem is, it tells us exactly nothing about how environmentally friendly they are as a team overall. Milram has an incentive to appear green friendly. It has less of an incentive to actually be green friendly.

So we get nice press releases about minor things like drink bottles, but we don’t have a comprehensive picture of how they compare to other teams in terms of carbon emissions, use of scarce resources etc.

Partly that’s because that’s hard. You can require disclosure of certain financial figures, but it’s a lot harder to even measure, nevermind disclose, the way Milram, or any team, or business, or individual is hurting/protecting the environment. Even with something as simple as drink bottles, it takes time to research the environmental friendliness of different suppliers [are their claims genuine? are they greenwashers?] , and whether a more friendly supplier justifies a higher cost. Multiply that by all the different pieces of equipment, and different suppliers that Milram uses. Add to that finding a way to reliably measure their carbon emissions from cars/trucks/bus/plane travel. And all their other environmental impacts.

The environmental cost of everything we do is hidden in myriad ways, and I think it will take a while before we have reliable, cheap and easy to use ways of untangling those costs, so that bike teams and other businesses and ngo’s and governments will report on their environmental impact as standard practice. Until then, we will have PR and drink bottles.

I mean, obviously PR will always exist, and right now Milram and anybody else (including me) could do a better job of measuring and reporting and reducing their environmental impact. But I think we’re in a weird kind of limbo where everybody agrees that there’s a problem and we should do something about it, but there’s not much real urgency or accountability.

But yay biodegradable bottles. Moooo!

I think they should seriously look at electric, or at least hybrid vehicles for the DS and other support vehicles. There are also electric motorbikes coming out now with sufficient range. Think of the riders, too, who inhale all those exhaust fumes from the camera bike hovering in front of them, or the caravan as they pace through after a flat. Electric/hybrid vehicles would help them, and would help the environment, plus it would make a good statement to the world.

Biodegradable water bottles. Ptooi. That’s like putting a band-aid on broken collar bone.