The 2012 Summer Olympic Games in London are now just a little over a year away and the organising committee for the event have just published the first environment report for the Games. Pre-construction targets were set to reduce the carbon footprint by over 100,000 tonnes of CO2 emissions and the report says that this goal will be met due to strategies invested in during material selection and the building process. It’s a very bold claim but the committee claim that July, 2012 Games will be the Olympic’s first ‘truly sustainable’.
This initial report was the first of three that are scheduled to be published which will assess the environmental impact of what has been a gargantuan project. Former British Olympic medalist Sebastian Coe is the chair of the organising committee and explained:

“Before these Games, no-one had cleaned two million tonnes of contaminated soil on-site. No-one had tried to calculate the complete carbon footprint of a Summer Games, and no-one had built an 80,000-seat stadium as light in structure and environmental impact as ours.”

Encouragingly, sustainability has been far more than a caveat to the whole project. According to David Stubbs who is operating as head of sustainability for the project the entire approach and decisions made were with the environmental impacts at the forefront:

“It is not just the stadium, it is the velodrome and other infrastructure that we are putting in.  All venues have a strong sustainability story to tell. If you have got the commitment at the beginning and you make it an important part of how you procure your contractors and designers, and you put it in the brief then people will come up with solutions. Put simply, it is a lightweight stadium and has a much smaller carbon footprint as a result.”

The report analyses five distinct aspects of the Olympic project including : waste; climate change; biodiversity; inclusion and healthy living. The results were all very much part of the advanced planning as the committee were formed to truly understand the impacts and then help develop a strategy to alleviate much of that pressure. Where possible existing structures are being used instead of building temporary locations which has often been a practice at previous games.

Another positive after the games will be the development of a huge 250-hectare site for parkland, recreation and sports. This will be the largest new park created in a major European city since the 1800′s.  Much of the area will be reclaimed land which was previously polluted and derelict urban zoning. Rivers have been cleaned up and better flood protection has also been part of the infrastructure improvements. Overall the report makes for encouraging reading and perhaps will serve as a blueprint for future events of this scale. I remain in favour of selecting just 3 or 4 sites around the planet to continually rotate the Olympics, World Cup and Commonwealth Games which would be a far more sustainable long term approach. The time will come when that logic is applied rather than massive construction projects that too often result in under utilised infrastructure improvements after the events have concluded.