2 February 2012 | Alan Bouquet
Construction, Europe

 

The London Olympics want to be seen as the greenest ever

With the London Olympics now less than six months away, the anticipation is building for what should be a grand sporting spectacle. London has billed the Olympics as the greenest ever, but what makes a mega-event like the Olympics green and were the Olympics of the past sustainable? There have been claims of sustainable Olympics in the past, but how much of this is reality and how much is spin?

Sydney is widely credited as one of the best Olympic experiences of recent times, yet it has struggled to integrate the massive developments into the city life.

In terms of post Olympic legacy, Atlanta planned well for the future of their venues. They designed them with a view to their future purposes, and not just for the games. For example, Georgia Tech University now runs the aquatic venues and the Atlanta Braves took over the Olympic Stadium as their baseball venue. It was also financially sustainable, as sponsorship meant the games broke even; the only games in recent history to not make a loss. The creation of the Centennial Olympic Park in a run-down area of the city proved to provide much impetus to the transformation of the area.

Barcelona 1992 is also credited with rejuvenating the city, making it the tourist destination that it is today. A legacy organisation exists to this day and most in the city acknowledge the benefits it brought the community.

In more recent times, the Athens Olympics of 2004 proved to be a huge strain on public finances. The venues were not designed with their future in mind, and thus nearly all lie unused to this day. The Greeks are still paying the price for the Olympics, and some of the current financial difficulties can be laid down to the debt created by the Games.

Beijing was the most expensive Olympics, costing a reported $40 billion. It also was plagued with reported human rights abuses; many homes were demolished with little compensation in the building phase of the project.

In terms of the Winter Olympics, the 2014 Sochi games in Russia have already been described as an environmental catastrophe, with rivers polluted, dumping grounds created, pipelines cutting through protected areas and World Wildlife Fund Russia and Greenpeace Russia resigning from the advisory committee in protest.

Throughout all of these Olympics, there have been few attempts to create a sustainable event from the ground up. There are so many considerations in creating a sustainable mega-event that it is easier to use greenwash and avoid the institutional difficulties associated with sustainability. London has made some strides in this area. The velodrome for example, uses sustainably sourced wood and water will be recycled from the swimming pools. The most sustainable way of creating an Olympics, some might say, is to not build new venues at all. In fact, London has specifically cut down new builds in order to be more sustainable.

It is actually more difficult to deal with secondary issues, like the environmental consequences of the extra air miles created from visitors, participants and supplies. What we can be sure of is that a truly sustainable Olympics will not happen for some time.

A possible solution would be to tie down the future events to a single location, removing the need for new builds every four years, but perhaps this is unnecessary, if efforts are made to ensure the Olympics regenerate a city, rather than bankrupt it; and that more is done to make the event environmentally, as well as financially sustainable.