Sustainability at UltraSwim33.3

At UltraSwim33.3 we care about our impact

“We are not perfect, but we are actively trying to improve our environmental impact all the time”

If you have swum an UltraSwim33.3 you will know that sustainability is at the core of everything we do. As an open water swimming event, we want to look after our land and oceans as best we can and appreciate the natural beauty of the nature we submerge ourselves in. We believe that as swimmers, endurance events and citizens of the world, we have a duty to protect our planet. This philosophy is one we carry with us in every decision we make, during and outside our events.

We are a carbon net positive event and our impact is a story we would like to keep transparent. We work with a partner called bloomUp who measure our carbon footprint for each event. Being a sports event, we have unavoidable emissions such as flights and speed boats used on the race course. We offset unavoidable emissions with Sea Trees by Sustainable Staff. We are not perfect, but we are actively trying to improve our impact all the time. At our events we try to eliminate single use plastic, we give our swimmers aluminium water bottles and at the feed stations we use re usable cups. We are working with our parters, Precision Fuel and Hydration, to reduce packaging. Our finisher medals are made out of up-cycled wood and old string from paraglider’s who can’t reuse it.

Our feed stations with reusable cups and as little packaging as possible

So what can you do? We ask that you return your water bottles if you already have one at home so we can reuse them. Look after packaging from gels while you’re in the water, we are strict on this and have a no tolerance policy on littering. We will hand you your gels open so you don’t have to fumble around in the water and end up with bits of packaging in the ocean, eat your gel then hand the wrapper back to us. Sunscreen is another big one, we ask you to use ocean friendly sunscreen. A lot of sunscreens contain toxins that cause everlasting damage to the reefs by bleaching the coral. Any sunscreen labelled non-nano zinc oxide or non-nano titanium dioxide is a safer option for our reefs. This is especially important for our long distance swimming events in Greece, Montenegro and Croatia where the sun is shining yet the coral below needs looking after and if you are spending hours each day in the water appreciating it, you need to help us look after it.

Our finisher droplets made out of 100% upcycled material