For rowers, maintaining clean and healthy waterways across the globe is a key concern for us- we rely on our rivers. Halting climate change more widely is obviously a priority for many people, especially in the wake of the COP26 summit in Glasgow last month, but rowers pay the price more than many other sports. Particularly regarding changing weather conditions, it is in our best interest to conserve our environments and practice more eco-friendly lifestyles.
Generally the impact of rowing on the environment is minimal- especially at junior club level. There is plenty of recycling done up and down the country (partly because it helps to decrease costs), from reusing old riggers and bolts on new boats to reusing old sports kit as maintenance cloths. The main areas of environmental damage are around driving to-, using a launch at- and not disposing of rubbish properly after sessions. All of these have fairly simple fixes, and there is guidance from British Rowing on how to become greener as a club (suggestions including running, cycling or carpooling to sessions and regularly maintaining launch boats so they run efficiently). Carpooling particularly is a great way for juniors to limit their environmental impact, whether travelling to your club or to an event, sharing vehicles is good for the climate and for building relationships with crew mates (as if you don’t see them enough already). Obviously at an international level the impact is increased via more travel demands and a higher consumption of kit and food, but the same principles of care do apply, especially with the more trivial lifestyle changes that can be made.
Looking more closely at the nutrition aspect, rowers notoriously consume more than the average person, but given we’re much more active it does make sense. Another way that we can help reduce our impact on the environment is adapting our diets to include some more plant-based alternatives. With the growth of vegetarianism and veganism over the past few decades, there are plenty of recipes out there of tasty snacks and meals that do less harm to the environment. At an elite level, there are many nutritionists that have been developing greener meal prepping for a while, one of whom is Nigel Mitchell. Whilst he has mainly worked with British Cycling, and other professional cycling teams, the recipes he uses can be easily transferred to other high-calorie sports. With base ingredients like rice, beans, nuts and oils, there is a whole range of nutritious snacks out there to replace their more environmentally damaging alternatives.
A big focus of COP26 was trying to eliminate the burning of coal as an energy source. Their aim was to reduce this usage in favour of a fuel that is much more renewable or ‘green’- using our knowledge of energy transfers to come up with innovative new power sources. As rowers, we spend a significant amount of time on ergos, which are essentially nothing more than energy converters (the rower providing the chemical input that is turned into mechanical power in the machine). Following this logic then, could we use our training plans to power our boathouses?
Creating the machine that could achieve such a conversion requires fairly simple physics, an alternator on the fly wheel connected to a battery to store the energy. Whilst the implementation of such a device would prove to be more difficult, the basic design is easy enough to follow. A hypothetical experiment was posed in Oxford Scientist Magazine Bang! Blog by engineering undergraduate Jai Juneja. He supposed that if the 1432 rowers of the Summer Eights races of 2011 were all hooked up to one of these machines, then on average they could collectively produce 790 kilowatt hours of energy per term.
The average annual consumption of electrical energy in the UK in 2012, when Juneja published his article, was 3300kWh, and is now just over 3,700kWh. This means that 6,707 rowers (over four and a half times as many as took part in that race) would be needed to produce enough energy for one household for a year- which isn’t massively efficient.
In the nine years since this calculation was made, technology for this type of energy transfers has no doubt improved, and so the 45% efficiency used in the original sum will now be higher. But it is still not high enough to seriously consider human mechanical power as a viable alternative to electric- at least not with our current physiological capabilities
With that in mind, whilst it may not be feasible to use our ergos to power our clubs, we can obviously still help to reduce our impacts on the climate in other ways. By introducing some more plant-based substitutes into our diets we can shrink our carbon footprints, and maybe even squeeze out some extra power? We can carpool to training and events to limit fossil fuel consumption and we can keep reusing all of our old kit to save both the club funds and the environment, which really, is a win win.
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