Fundraisers off to Rio

Fundraisers are invited to get involved.

Suez staff are taking part in the Rio Roadshow, which will see hundreds of employees participate in sporting challenges.

The aim is to cover as many miles as possible towards the 5,761 mile distance between London and Rio.

A special ‘carnival bus’ decked out with exercise equipment will travel to 130 of Suez’s locations over the five-week period in a continuous ‘roadshow’ – starting in Inverness, Scotland, and finishing in St Erth, down in Cornwall.

Week three of the event kicked off in Warwick on Monday, before going to offices and a household recycling centre in Leicestershire, then a site in Rugby, where waste is turned into an alternative fuel, and finally to a water business in Daventry, which is part of Suez Treatment Solutions UK.

On Tuesday it called in at four sites: Brackmills transfer station in Daventry; Sidegate Lane transfer station and former landfill in Wellingborough, the energy-from-waste facility in Suffolk and a transport depot in Maldon, Essex.

Participants at each location were sponsored to rack up as many miles as they could on the equipment before the bus moved on.

Sites were encouraged to organise their own events around the carnival bus arriving.

David Palmer-Jones, chief executive officer of Suez recycling and recovery UK, said: “In 2014, we managed to raise over £100,000 for Macmillan and most of that was generated by The Big Ride event, which was fantastically well received by our employees and clients.

“We wanted to do something similarly sporting this year, which would involve as many of our 5,500 employees as possible.

“However, with it being an Olympic year, the event had to have an Olympic theme, so we set ourselves the ambitious target of ‘getting to Rio’ – covering nearly 6,000 miles by human power alone.”