LOS ANGELES — Sunday marks Loren Piretra’s 17th marathon. The avid runner is an official Los Angeles Marathon ambassador, and a race-sanctioned pacer.

“Running is the one thing I do that’s just 100% for me. It’s my time to sweat it all out, and it’s a powerful reminder of my own strength—that I can do tough things,” Piretra said.

But as Piretra has run more races, she said she’s noticed that the events can produce a lot of waste. Plastic bottles are tossed on the road and trash can pile up after marathons.

“It’s really hard to watch, I train runners and I really drill into them that things go in the waste bins, recycle where we can and more importantly, just reducing our impact overall, not taking more than we need,” she said.

It’s not just individual runners who are being more contentious when it comes to this year’s marathon. Streets LA used some electric trucks to set up the barricades along the 26.2-mile route.

One of the EV’s is not on the market yet. Streets LA has a pre-production version of a Roush Clean Tech Ford F650.

Greg Spotts, the chief sustainability officer and executive officer at Streets LA, said using heavy duty EV’s can have a significant impact for large-scale programs in Los Angeles.

“Every one of these events has a lot of transportation associate with it. There’s a lot of trucking and if we can move that trucking to zero emissions, we can reduce carbon emissions and reduce pollution and noise for the community.”

Streets LA made a concerted effort to bring more electric vehicles into their fleet, specifically for city wide events.

“We have more than 1,000 vehicles of all different types, many are not yet available, but we want to be the first to borrow, pilot or rent them, to help drive market adoption,” Spotts said.

At the Marathon Expo, held at Dodger Stadium, official sponsor Asics was working to keep waste out of landfills. John Ealy is category director of performance running at Asics and said materials and displays have been saved from previous events.

“We want to make sure we help support runners, but we know it can be very wasteful with all the marketing materials, so what we try to do is reuse and repurpose, so it looks new and fresh, but doesn’t hurt the planet by throwing it away after each event,” he said.

While some displays are used year after year, billboards and banners emblazoned with specific dates can’t be reused, instead they’ve been repurposed. Over 2,000 bags were made from last year’s marketing materials. They were given out throughout the weekend with an Asics purchase.

“We want to make sure we aren’t tossing everything away but reutilizing materials,” Ealy said.

As a runner, Piretra said she’s directly experienced the impact of climate change, from increasingly hot days to running through smoke from California’s wildfires.

“Running has given me so much, especially in these beautiful places,” she said. “I just want to be kinder to the planet and give back to the places that have given so much to me, and make sure we can maintain and sustain them.”