I've been running and cycling for years. I love it. Dan (my co-founder & brother) loves it, most people who know us know we spend a lot of weekends out on the trails or roads. And for a long time, like most endurance athletes, I thought almost nothing about the waste I was leaving behind.
You tear an energy gel open open, you fuel up, you keep moving. That's just how it works.
But when we started looking into it properly, the numbers made us genuinely uncomfortable. And I think if more runners knew what we found out, they'd feel the same way.
How much plastic waste does a Marathon actually generate?
Let's start with the race itself.
A typical marathon runner takes between 1 and 3 energy gels per hour, depending on their pace and how long they're out there. Over a 4-hour finish, that's anywhere from 4 to 12 gel wrappers per person.
Now multiply that by the field size. A major city marathon, London, Manchester, Chicago, can have 40,000–50,000 participants. Even at the conservative end, that's hundreds of thousands of individual single-use plastic wrappers generated in a single morning.
Estimates suggest a major city marathon can generate up to 900,000 units of plastic waste from energy gels alone, in a single event.
And that's before you add the water cups, the foil sachets, the chew wrappers. The gel number alone is staggering.
Where do energy gel wrappers actually go?
This is the part that doesn't get talked about enough.
Most energy gel wrappers are made from multi-layer laminated plastic, usually a combination of polyethylene and foil. That structure is what gives them their shelf stability and that satisfying tear, but it also means they can't be separated into recyclable streams.
The vast majority are non-recyclable in standard household or kerbside bins.
Some end up in general waste and go to landfill or incineration. Some get dropped on the course and are swept up by race crews. And some, inevitably, end up in the environment.
A gel wrapper left in nature can take anywhere from 80 to 500 years to fully decompose.
Think about that for a second. The wrapper from your first ever race is still out there somewhere.
Is the endurance sports industry doing enough?
Honestly, not really.
Most major gel brands haven't fundamentally changed how they package their product in decades. There's been some movement toward compostable sachets from smaller brands, but compostable packaging only breaks down properly in industrial composting conditions, which most people don't have access to, and won't do much if it ends up on the side of a trail.
The core issue is the single-serving sachet model. It's convenient. It's familiar. It's also fundamentally wasteful by design.
A runner completing a full season of races, say 5 or 6 events, plus regular long training runs, could easily go through 200–300 gel wrappers in a year. Per person.
Scale that to the millions of endurance runners and cyclists in the UK alone, and you start to see the problem clearly.
The bigger picture: endurance sports and environmental identity
Here's what I find genuinely strange about all of this.
Endurance athletes, runners especially, tend to have a real connection to the outdoors. Trail runners have an obvious relationship with nature. Road runners often log miles in parks, along rivers, through green spaces. Cyclists are out in the countryside for hours at a time.
Most endurance athletes I've spoken to care about the environment. They'd never intentionally litter. They recycle at home. They think about their footprint in other areas of life.
But somewhere along the way, the single-use gel wrapper became so normalised in endurance sport that it stopped registering as litter. It became just part of the kit.
That's worth interrogating, I think.
What are the alternatives?
This is the part that actually matters, because it's easy to identify a problem and hard to offer a practical fix.
Here's the honest landscape:
Compostable gel sachets are being trialled by some brands. As mentioned, they require industrial composting to break down effectively and don't solve the problem if disposed of incorrectly.
Real food options, dates, rice balls, banana pieces, have a loyal following in ultra running and cycling. They work well on longer, lower-intensity efforts but are harder to use practically at race pace or on faster events where ease of consumption matters. Read our full guide on natural carbohydrates you can use for running.
Homemade fuel, squeezy honey, maple syrup, DIY salt mixes, is how a lot of athletes start when they first question conventional gels. It works, but the carbohydrate ratios aren't always optimal and the consistency can make gut issues more likely during hard efforts.
Refillable systems paired with bulk powder are a newer approach, and one we think is the most practical long-term fix. The idea is simple: instead of buying 20 individual sachets, you buy a bulk pouch of fuel powder and fill your own reusable soft flask before each run. No single-use wrapper, no waste, and if the formula is right, no performance compromise either.
The key is getting the nutritional side right. Endurance performance depends on the carbohydrate blend, specifically a higher ratio of glucose to fructose, which allows the body to absorb carbohydrates faster and in greater volumes than single-carb sources. Any refillable option needs to hit that brief, with the electrolytes to match, otherwise you're just solving the plastic problem and creating a new one. Our product Hebe ticks all of these boxes.
What does a lower-waste Marathon fuelling strategy actually look like?
If you wanted to rethink your fuelling setup from scratch with environmental impact in mind, here's a practical framework:
Audit your current usage: Count how many gels you go through in a typical training block. Most people are surprised by the number when they actually add it up.
Switch your training fuel first: Races are high-stakes, so change your race fuel last. Training runs are the place to experiment with new formats, whether that's a refillable flask system, real food on longer efforts, or a different product altogether.
Look at the ingredient list: Independently of the packaging question, it's worth knowing what's actually in your fuel. A lot of conventional gels contain a list of ingredients that reads more like a chemistry set than food: maltodextrin, sodium benzoate, citric acid, natural flavours (a catch-all that can mean a lot of things), thickeners, gelling agents. None of that is necessarily harmful, but if you care about what you put in your body, it's worth being deliberate about it.
Think in systems, not swaps: Switching from one gel brand to another with slightly greener packaging isn't going to change much. The bigger opportunity is changing the model entirely, from single-serve to reusable, from synthetic to natural, from throw-away to fill-and-go.
Pressure-test at events: Soft flasks have become near-universal in trail running. They're less common on road marathons, but they work just as well. If you can carry your own fuel in a vest or belt, you can fuel from a flask rather than tearing open a sachet.
A Note on Race Organisers
It's worth saying that a lot of marathon and endurance event organisers are genuinely trying to reduce their impact. Many events have moved away from plastic cups to water stations, or offer cup-free options. Some larger events have started asking nutrition sponsors to commit to sustainability targets.
But the gel wrapper problem is harder to solve at the event level because the product is brought in by athletes, not the race organisation. It's a supply chain and consumer behaviour issue as much as an event management one.
The brands making the gels are the ones who need to move. And the athletes buying them, meaning us, have a role to play in signalling what we want.
The Bottom Line
Endurance athletes have a genuine tension to resolve here. We're out in nature more than most people. We see the seasons change, we notice when rivers run low, we're physically in the landscape in a way that a lot of people aren't.
And we're also generating a significant amount of single-use plastic waste to do it.
That doesn't have to be the trade-off. The fuelling science is good enough that you don't need to compromise on performance to use a cleaner system. The technology for reusable flask systems exists and works. And the awareness in the running community is genuinely shifting.
The question is whether the industry moves fast enough to keep up.
We'd say it's worth not waiting to find out.
George Harper is co-founder of Hebe, a natural endurance nutrition brand based in Dorset. Hebe makes a four-ingredient, natural carb-electrolyte blend in a reusable system designed for runners, cyclists, and triathletes who want to eliminate single-use gel wrappers without sacrificing performance.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much plastic waste does a marathon create? A major city marathon can generate up to 900,000 units of plastic waste from energy gels and sachets alone, when you account for all participants across the full event.
Are energy gel wrappers recyclable? Most are not. Standard energy gel wrappers are made from multi-layer laminated plastic and foil, which can't be separated for recycling in standard kerbside or in-store soft plastic schemes.
How long does an energy gel wrapper take to decompose? Estimates vary, but most multi-layer plastic wrappers take between 80 and 450 years to fully decompose in a natural environment.
What is a refillable gel system? A refillable carb-electrolyte esystem replaces single-serve sachets with a reusable soft flask that you fill from a bulk powder pouch before each run. It eliminates single-use plastic waste while delivering the same carbohydrate and electrolyte content.
What carbohydrate ratio is best for endurance running? Research consistently supports a 2:1 glucose-to-fructose ratio for endurance performance. This dual-carbohydrate approach allows the body to absorb up to 90g of carbohydrate per hour rather than the ~60g ceiling of single-carb sources.
Can you use a soft flask in a road marathon? Yes. Soft flasks work in running vests and waist belts and are entirely practical for road marathons. They're already standard in trail and ultra running.
