Sustainability Weekly

SUSTAINABILITY
Written By Dara Magagnoli

Fridays are for…

Everything sustainable about the Paris 2024 Olympics!

by Alli DiGiacomo

Happy Friday! Today marks the official start of the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris. The opening ceremony begins at 1:30 pm ET.  For the first time in Summer Games history, athletes will travel in boats (including 30 electric boats) along the Seine River instead of parading in an arena. The Games will include 329 medal events across 35 venues, with 10,500 athletes from 206 countries, including 600 athletes from the U.S. The Games run through Aug. 11, followed by the Paralympics from Aug. 28 to Sept. 8. See a full schedule of events here​. 

Also this week was the hottest day on earth ever recorded… again. In other words, on Monday, Earth experienced the warmest average global surface temperature ever, reaching 62.87ºF. This is just a touch higher than the all-time high of 62.76ºF recorded 24 hours earlier. And both days broke the new heat record set just last year. The trend is particularly worrying since the El Niño weather pattern, which tends to overlap with the warmest years on record, is now over. 

Keep reading below for more Olympic-related sustainability news!

SUSTAINABILITY OF THE PARIS 2024 OLYMPICS: 

The Paris 2024 Olympics are an ambitious experiment in sustainable event planning, highlighting both the potential and limitations of integrating environmental considerations into large-scale events. While these measures are ambitious, they also highlight the challenges and debates surrounding the environmental impact of large-scale events like the Olympics. 

Below are some sustainable initiatives in the Paris 2024 Games making a positive impact: 

1. Reuse of 95% Existing Infrastructure: Rather than constructing new buildings, the organizers are repurposing historic structures like the iconic 80,000-seat Stade de France in Saint-Denis, the Grand Palais, and the 1924 Olympic pool. This approach significantly reduces emissions from construction materials like concrete and steel. 95% of Olympic venues are facilities that either already exist or have been temporarily assembled and will be dismantled for future reuse after the Games.

2. Green Energy Initiatives: The games will use 100% renewable energy sourced locally. All venues are connected to the grid, using energy from solar panels, including a temporary installation on the Seine, and will have enough wind and solar energy in the grid to cover the event's electricity needs. 

3. Transportation and Mobility: Paris is expanding bike lanes and reducing car spaces, promoting cycling over driving. The city is also enhancing public transport infrastructure to accommodate the influx of visitors. Changes to transportation methods in Paris have reduced air pollution by 40%. Paris has closed more than 100 streets to motor vehicles, tripled parking fees for SUVs, removed roughly 50,000 parking spots, and constructed more than 800 miles of bike lanes. For the grounds/facilities, the use of electric, hybrid and hydrogen-powered vehicles are provided by Toyota.

4. Sustainable Food and Waste Management: The games will feature menus that prioritize less environmentally taxing food options, such as plant-based meals over meat-heavy dishes. Beverages served to the millions of spectators attending the games will be in reusable cups, and they will be allowed to bring reusable water bottles into the venues for the free drinking fountains - an expectation to French regulations. In the Olympic Village, there will be a 50% reduction in single-use plastics in catering, and 100% of catering equipment and infrastructure after the Games will be reused. 

5. Innovative Cooling Solutions: In place of traditional air conditioning, the athletes’ village will use a geo-exchange system that cools buildings using water from underground sources. City officials say they have planted thousands of trees in recent years to temper summer heat. They are erecting misting towers to spray the air. 

6. Carbon Emissions Cap and Offset: The organizers have set a target to produce no more than half the greenhouse gas emissions compared to the London 2012 and Rio 2016 average, aligning with the Paris Agreement on Climate Change. The event will account for all carbon emissions (scopes 1, 2 and 3), encompassing direct, indirect and spectator travel emissions.

7. Long-Term Urban Improvements: New constructions, like the Athletes Village, are designed for long-term use, incorporating sustainable materials like timber, and features like green roofs and energy-efficient systems. This also includes furniture such as coffee tables made from recycled badminton shuttlecocks, bean bags made from parachute fabric, chairs made from recycled bottle caps and sofas made from Vauban barriers. (See more on this below.)

T H I S W E E K ’ S T O P S T O R I E S

PARIS IS REUSING THE OLYMPIC VILLAGE FOR PERMANENT HOUSING AFTER THE GAMES

In the past, attempts to reuse Olympic infrastructure have often failed. Not only is the infrastructure essentially single-use and notoriously wasteful, more times than not stadiums and other venues end up underused and expensive to maintain post-games, usually because figuring out what to do with the Olympic build-outs is an afterthought. In some cases, after thousands of people are displaced, organizers make promises to build affordable social housing that fall through, such as in Rio de Janeiro, London, and Vancouver. 

Paris is keeping the city’s future in mind as it creates the 2024 Summer Games’ Olympic Village. Rather than the usual approach, Paris is building a new low-carbon, mixed-use neighborhood in a part of the city that needs more housing and revitalization. Olympic athletes will just be its first residents. Once the 2024 Games are over, the neighborhood will resume “normal” operations with rental housing, apartments for sale, offices, and more. Paris is also adding bus stations, bike paths, a park (where the athlete bus areas will be), and retail space (the athletes’ medical facilities).

The buildings, designed by UAPS, have the goal of being as sustainable as possible, with construction that produces 50% fewer greenhouse gas emissions than standard construction. 94% of materials were recovered from deconstruction. The section called Quinconce uses wood rather than steel in smaller buildings, and low-carbon concrete in taller buildings. All wood sourced from eco-managed forests, including a minimum of 30 per cent French wood. Low-carbon ceramic tiles are on the facade. The buildings will use little energy; instead of standard air-conditioning, they rely on geothermal heating and cooling and passive design strategies like thick insulation and carefully placed shading. 15% of the future neighborhood’s electricity consumption will be covered through photovoltaic energy from solar panels on rooftops.

Water from the buildings will be recycled into landscaping on the site. One experimental building, with permission to test technology that isn’t yet allowed under current regulations, will recycle shower water. When the toilets are flushed, the waste will be separated so it’s possible to make ammonia for fertilizer from the urine. A mini forest, including 1,000 large trees and nearly 8,000 young trees and shrubs, primarily from native plant species, will grow next to the buildings. 6 hectares of green spaces, including 1.2 hectares of open ground, will create cool islands and reduce building temperatures. On rooftops, gardens are being planted to support migrating birds.

PODIUMS AND NEW SEATING MADE OF 100% RECYCLED PLASTIC IN LOCAL PARISIAN FACTORY

In a first for any Olympic Games, a start-up called Le Pavé is building seating and podiums using 100% recycled plastic locally in a factory on the outskirts of Paris. Le Pavé used 100 metric tons of recycled bottles and bottle caps to make panels for the 11,000 stadium seats, which were pressed into form by a French company specializing in arena seating. To create the panels used for the 68 silver-hued Olympic victory podiums, Le Pavé used 18 metric tons of recycled plastic and plastic foam food containers.

It all started with two architecture students at the University of Versailles in 2016, who bought a used pizza oven and started experimenting with melting discarded plastic they chopped up in a blender.  In 2018, Marius Hamelot and Jim Pasquet, friends since childhood, created Le Pavé and won a series of innovation competitions that got them into La Ruche, an incubator in Paris with a focus on social entrepreneurship, digital technology and crafts and culture, where they raised modest funding.

Mr. Hamelot and Mr. Pasquet worked with 50 local recycling companies to gather used plastic, experimenting with dozens of prototypes and stress testing before inking a final deal with Solideo in 2022 for the stadium chairs. They then expanded from 3 employees to 34, including employees who had been on long-term unemployment, as well as an asylum seeker and a former prisoner eager for a fresh start, aiming to have a big social impact locally. Also adding an educational element, they worked with Lemon Tree, a nongovernmental organization, to include 50 elementary and middle schools in the Ile-de-France region. Around 1,700 schoolchildren collected one million yellow bottle caps that were used to infuse the black-and-white stadium chairs with flecks of color.

OLYMPIC MEDALS ARE REPURPOSED FROM EIFFEL TOWER IRON

Medals are the most coveted object of the Olympics Games for athletes, and they will all contain part of the most iconic symbol of Paris, the Eiffel Tower. Each medal will have 18 grams of original iron from the Eiffel Tower inserted, placed at the heart of the medals, to highlight circular economy messaging. The metal was removed and preserved during previous renovation campaigns, and now the Eiffel Tower operating company has allowed these pieces of history to find “second glory.” The gold and silver used for the medals are both 100% recycled and certified by the Responsible Jewellery Council. The bronze medals are made from an alloy of copper, tin and zinc reused from metal scraps from other productions of the Monnaie de Paris, a government-owned institution responsible for producing France's coins.

MORE IN SUSTAINABILITY NEWS

  1. ​Hailing from 11 different countries, 37 athletes will compete in Paris as part of the Refugee Olympic Team. The team was created for the Rio Games in 2016 as a symbol of hope and to raise awareness about the global refugee crisis.

Dara Magagnoli
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