London goes for gold at the low-carbon Olympics

Article taken from the Times. to view article, click here

Staging the London 2012 Olympic Games is a huge undertaking. Hundreds of contractors are being hired and billions of pounds spent. Behind all the activity is the promise that the games will be environmentally friendly - indeed, the pledge to make these the first low-carbon games helped London beat off bids from rival cities.

"The commitment to create a sustainable legacy and take advantage of new technologies to create a low-carbon event - all of that influenced our decision to award London the 2012 contract," said Gilbert Felli, executive director of the International Olympic Committee.

That commitment is proving tricky to honour. According to a report published last week by the Olympic Delivery Authority, the games will produce about 2m tonnes of carbon dioxide - better, it claims, than the 3.4m tonnes that would have been produced without the measures taken to cut emissions. Almost all the carbon dioxide, the authority says, will come from the construction of the games' facilities. To put that into proportion, the UK produced 550m tonnes of carbon dioxide last year.

A separate report, from the commission set up to police the games' environmental performance, says that the organisers looked at offsetting the emissions by buying carbon credits, but decided against it. Instead, the Commission for a Sustainable London 2012 said that the games' best legacy could be an overhaul of the British construction industry.

"The Olympics are on track to meet most of their environmental commitments but at the end of the day the games will still add 2m tonnes of carbon to the atmosphere, so we need to find a way to mitigate this," said Shaun McCarthy, who heads the commission. "We thought of a number of ways to do this, including buying offsets, but decided against that. We concluded that the best solution is to use the experience of building the Olympics to overhaul completely the construction industry so that eventually the emissions of the games will be counteracted."

One way to do this would be to encourage construction firms across Britain to take up the method of concrete production adopted for the games venues, which uses recycled materials such as byproducts from coal power stations and steel making.

Using concrete with a high recycled content and transporting the raw materials to the site by railway rather than road has cut nearly 80,000 tonnes of emissions, a 42% reduction against the UK industry average for concrete.

"The construction process needs to be rethought to reduce its environmental impact at every stage, from inception to disposal," said McCarthy.

He said the Olympic project had highlighted the flawed nature of the environmental ratings used for buildings in Britain. "The system is clearly not working because we can design buildings such as the aquatics centre, which uses four times as much material as necessary, and it still has an excellent rating," said McCarthy. "By comparison, the velodrome is an excellent example of low-carbon design because it minimises the use of materials."

One area where the 2012 Olympics is lagging behind is in finding ways to cut the waste that will go to landfill. "We are disappointed at the lack of progress in developing organic waste-disposal facilities, which is missing the opportunity to cut the carbon footprint further, and puts the ambition to deliver zero waste to landfill at risk," said McCarthy.

David Stubbs, head of sustainability for the London 2012 organising committee, said games officials would be putting more pressure on suppliers to track their emissions and increase recycling rates.

"As we get nearer to the games, we will know much more about our emissions and be able to share that with businesses so they can learn from our experiences," he said. "We are not the first event to do a carbon footprint, but the difference with London is we have gone into depth on how to create a sustainable legacy."

To download the report 'Extinguishing emissions: a review of the approach taken to carbon measurement and management across the 2012 programme', click here

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