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More exciting news from Denmark! Aarhus is getting ready to host one of its biggest events this year: the 2018 Hempel Sailing World Championships. From 30 July to 12 August, the event is expected to draw over 1,500 sailors from up to 100 nations, and around 400,000 visitors! The Championships will be one of the biggest and most important sailing events ever held, with more boats, sailors and countries on the starting lines than ever seen before.

In a major event like this, there are lots of sustainability challenges, from food waste to plastics. Which is why, under the vision of The International Sailing Association: that the sport has no negative impact on the environment, the Aarhus 2018 event is ambitious enough to make this vision a reality. The objectives are to raise awareness of the problem with plastic pollution of the oceans while focusing on new sustainable solutions. Therefore, local actors, companies and organizations with a focus on sustainability, innovative solutions and resource-optimizing conditions are invited on board. Taking the UN Sustainable Development goals (SDGs) as their guiding line for their sustainability programme, they have mapped the following goals and actions for the event:

SDG 14: Life below water: Waste management systems for boats

A waste bag is designed to alleviate the waste management problem on boats that there is currently no solution for. The custom designed bag will be implemented by all participating nations under the championships as a giveaway

SDG 6: Clean water and sanitation: Clean drinking water

Clean drinking tap water is normal in Denmark. Thus reminding the participants to drink the water and giving away only refillable water bottles, no disposables and make refilling easy by establishing water posts at the Venue.

SDG 12: Responsible consumption and production: Recycling and catering 

• • Pushing for locally produced organic food.
  • Reducing and sorting catering waste.
  • Plastic and resource optimisation by recycling, deposit schemes and collecting.

SDG 11: Sustainable cities and communities: Making audience use city bikes and public transportation

At Aarhus2018 transport for Race Officials is provided by Donkey Republic, the Danish bike-share startup and official city bike-share provider for Aarhus.

Data collection:

Data Collection of the event’s resource consumption (transport, energy etc.), which can be used as benchmarks by The City of Aarhus and World Sailing for future events. Looking into these categories beforehand will make it possible to analyse what can be optimised before the event is carried out. Data collection with therefore be used both as a checklist before the championship takes place as well as a debriefing tool afterwards.

We invite you to explore the event sustainability programme here. For more information about the event, click here.