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To understand the challenge of making these Paris Olympics the “greenest-ever Games,” consider the Coke.
Organizers planned to cut in half the amount of plastic used at the London 2012 Games, in part by establishing a system of reusable plastic cups at the concession stands in the venues. Each cup came with a 2-euro deposit. But Olympic sponsor Coca-Cola had trouble installing soda fountains everywhere, so many venues had the worst of both worlds: Plastic bottles in the fridge, each one emptied into a plastic cup. In addition to being silly, it was slow.
It’s a small example of a broader trend: Paris 2024 had enormous ambitions for the Games, planning to cut the carbon footprint by more than 50 percent compared to the London Games 12 years ago. But there are some things inherent to the Olympics, like the role of Coca-Cola, that you can only change so much.
At the competitions themselves, the focus on sustainability is impossible to miss. There are the slogans: “One, two, tri” (the French word for recycling); “Veni, vidi, veggie”; and “Have a gourde day” (the French word for water bottle). These are the first pro sports venues I’ve ever entered where metal water bottles are permitted, and many people are bringing them.
Other high-profile commitments have been made at the Olympic Village, where there is no food coming by plane; the beds are made of cardboard, and the mattresses from recycled materials. There was supposed to be no air conditioning, though that promise has been undercut by the national Olympic committees.
But the bulk of the Olympic carbon budget comes from three sources: energy, construction, and transportation. On energy, France had a head start: Its power grid is among the cleanest in the world, since most electricity comes from nuclear plants. Anything Olympic that’s not connected to the grid is running on batteries and solar panels.
Construction is the more interesting part. Most venues are temporary structures; each of the two new stadiums is an environmental showpiece. The arena at Porte de la Chapelle (soon to be the home of a Parisian basketball team) is made from low-carbon concrete, filters the air from the nearby highway, and is framed in recycled aluminum. The Aquatics Center, with its dipping roof to minimize the volume of air to be cooled or heated, is a modular building whose wooden components were cut and finished in Alsace before being assembled on-site in Saint-Denis. One of the designers told Bloomberg CityLab: “You can smell [the wood] when you’re in the pool.”
The nearby Olympic Village is a veritable world’s fair of eco-friendly construction technology. There’s the geothermal heat pump system, with pipes running under the floors, that designers say obviates the need for conventional air conditioning. There will be open-plan apartments cooled by the breeze from the Seine and shaded from the high summer sun by balconies. There is the unprecedented use of wood, which France’s Olympic construction company says will change the viability of tall wood-frame buildings in France with insurance companies. And there is even a building whose toilets separate the contents of the bowl the moment you flush, with the solids getting composted in a nearby facility and the liquids treated and reused in that same building’s gardens, toilets, and washing machines!
Laurent Barelier, an environmental official with the regional government in Saint-Denis, said part of the Games’ environmental legacy will be in setting this example: “We are looking at using their innovations elsewhere,” he told me.
Finally, there’s transportation. Paris has been a global leader in reducing automobile dependency in recent years, with more and more people traveling by bike or by train, and so far everyone involved in the Games appears to be traveling similarly: Athletes in buses from the Village, everyone else on the subway. Traffic on the city’s ring-road highway last month was down by 20 percent compared to a standard July.
And yet the Olympics by their very nature are never going to be an environmentally friendly project. “All that progress is counterbalanced or offset by the relentless growth of the Olympics,” said Sven Daniel Wolfe, a geographer in Zurich who is studying the aftereffects of mega-events. These Games, he pointed out, “are the largest in history, both in terms of tickets sold and athletes competing, and that has a carbon footprint.” All that international plane travel is, like the sponsorship of a giant soda company, a part of the Games that is all but impossible to let go of.
The travel of the more than 10 million attendees is accounted for in the Paris plans to cut emissions, and some observers are trying to figure out if it’s working—tabulating, Coke bottle by cardboard mattress by portable air conditioner, whether the Games succeed or fail.
That misses the point. “The Olympic Games is a drop in the bucket in carbon impact, but it’s more of a symbolic win,” Wolfe observes. “If the Olympics could be authentically, ecologically sustainable, that has tremendous platform power to move global societies.”
This is a different way of measuring the Games’ carbon impact and influence. Can they shift expectations about the way people get around the city, or what they eat? Can they change practices in the construction sector? Maybe so. Can they convince a bunch of young people to forgo air conditioning? Maybe not.
Do they dare challenge the global elite’s addiction to international airplane travel, one of the hardest industrial sectors to decarbonize? That would require a rethinking of the Olympics far more fundamental than the design of the stadiums.
