Swiss Alps 100

The Swiss Alps 100 is a GREEN COMMITMENT event.

Our event takes us to spectacular, natural, remote and fragile landscapes. This is a privilege and we fully support the preservation of these landscapes. Climate change endangers us, our planet and future generations. We must reduce the impact of our activities on the climate and demonstrate climate leadership by actively and collectively working towards climate neutrality. For these reasons, Swiss Alps 100 is committed to the goals of Leave no Trace, Carbon Neutrality and Zero Waste.

We also work with Saubere-Veranstaltung.ch and currently have 76% of their eco-points. We are constantly working to improve these eco-points.

Our next milestone is to be carbon neutral by the 2025 event and we are currently working towards this goal.

We teamed up with pacovis.ch who are supplying us all the single-use items like cups, plates, bowls, wine glasses, forks, knives, and forks to our aid stations and at the finish line. All these products are made from raw plant materials that can be quickly regrown, are 100% biodegradable and climate friendly. All those products have zero plastics! Our costs are significantly higher with these products compared to the plastic alternatives but it is the right thing to do. We could also have ordered the same from China for much cheaper but we want to avoid the carbon footprint having them ship from China (4,722 miles) vs. from within Switzerland (102 miles).

We are working with almightytree.ch to give participants the option of not getting a race t-shirt, but instead donating the cost of the t-shirt to plant a tree in Switzerland. For every 6 T-shirts donated, Almighty Tree will plant a new tree in Switzerland.

Since 2023, 539 runners have donated their T-shirts, which will be used to plant 90 new trees. See our progress.

To mark the Swiss Alps 100 courses we are using approximately 2500 flags and 1500 ribbons. In order to dramatically reduce waste we pay more for flags, which have a bamboo stick instead of a plastic stick. Bamboo sticks are stronger and we reuse about 95% of the marking flags. The ribbons are made of fabric and not plastic and they have stainless steel clips which not only makes it easy to mark the course and remove them. More importantly, they do not break or rust and can be used year after year.

You can read more about our course marking initiatives here.

Every race needs aid stations and at the Swiss Alps 100 we have 13 of them. Many races are using portable inverter generators to produce electricity which emits various air pollutants, such as carbon monoxide, volatile organic compounds, xylene, carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, and others.

At the Swiss Alps 100 we strategically placed our aid stations so 12 out of 13 of them are using a clean energy plug-in instead of a generator. The Breithorn aid station is the most remote one and there is simply no available electricity. But even there we use natural gas to cook and heat the aid station and the generator is only used to power the communication devices.

Since 2021, the Swiss Alps 100 is a cupless race. We are doing this in order to reduce the every growing pile of plastic trash. Many races are adopting to this practice which is awesome and it's not too much to ask for runners to carry a small foldable and reusable cup while they run.

Our race location has its own train station called "Fiesch-Feriendorf" at the Sport Resort in Fiesch. It's only 200 meters away from the start/finish area. Runners are encouraged to take advantage of this and use public transportation.

Our main sponsor, the Aletsch Arena, is offering an Aletsch Explorer Pass, which not only gives you free use of the cable cars in the entire Aletsch Arena, but also includes the train ride from Brig to the race station.

Our start/finish location is at the Sport Resort in Fiesch, which is committed to the environment and sustainability.

They have 1,491 solar panels on their roofs that produce about 250,000 kWh of environmentally friendly electricity per year, and 80 solar panels that help heat their swimming pool water. For heating, they use FSC-certified woodchip heating with locally sourced wood fuel, which saves approximately 252,000 liters of heating oil per year, equivalent to a reduction of over 760 tons of CO2 emissions.

Since 2021 we have a partnership with the Aletsch Arena.

This partnership works well because not only do we want to promote tourism in this incredibly beautiful area, but we also have the same strong beliefs in sustainability as the Aletsch Arena. For example, all of their cable cars and lifts are powered by renewable energy from local hydroelectric plants owned by EnBAG (Energie Brig-Aletsch-Goms).

We will continuously change the way we work to contribute more to fight climate change. As we make changes we will announce it on this page.