‘Greenest ever Games’: how the Paris Olympics hopes to inspire a new era of global sporting events

Beneath the undulating wooden roof of the Paris Olympics’ new aquatics centre, the architect Laure Mériaud hoped the groundbreaking low carbon building would bring a kind of calm to the intersection of motorways near the Stade de France stadium in the Paris suburb of Saint-Denis.

“It’s not just about technical innovation,” she said. “It’s about creating a more pleasant, greener space for local people’s daily lives here after the Games.”

The organisers of the Paris Olympics – which begin in July – have vowed they will be the “greenest ever Games”, halving the carbon footprint of London 2012 and Rio 2016 from their average of 3.5m tonnes of CO2 to about 1.75m tonnes.

Mostly using existing stadiums instead of embarking on the giant Olympic building projects of the past, making athletes’ bedside tables from recycled badminton shuttlecocks and providing dinner plates without logos which can be repurposed after the Games, the Paris committee has said it is setting a precedent for cleaner global sporting events.

But environmental analysts warn that the very act of holding a planetary sporting event like the Olympics has to be completely reconsidered if the world is to reach net zero targets in 2050. In future, the sporting events could be spread over various locations instead of the current model of millions of spectators flying to one city, they suggest.

“The single most important decision we have made is not to build,” said Georgina Grenon, environmental excellence director for Paris 2024. Unlike the major building projects of the Rio, London and Tokyo games, 95% of the sites that will be used in Paris are existing venues or temporary structures. The new-build projects include the aquatics centre and the athletes’ village in the low-income département of Seine-Saint-Denis north of Paris. “The second most important decision was to build those low-carbon,” Grenon said – from wood to low carbon concrete, to transporting rubble down the Seine by barge rather than by truck.

Grenon said Paris had “pushed as hard as we can” to change the way future sporting and non-sporting events are run – crucially by connecting sports venues to the electricity mains supply instead of the massive diesel generators that stadiums usually rely on. “For the London Games, there were four million litres of diesel burned just for electricity purposes,” Grenon said. She hoped other events – including Paris fashion weeks – would now ditch diesel generators. “The idea is that if the Games – which are on such a huge scale – can do things differently, other sporting and cultural events can too.”

Unlike previous Olympics, where carbon footprints were calculated at the end, Paris is adding up the emissions of policy decisions before each step.

In the Olympic Village, the athletes’ apartments will be converted into homes, with at least a third destined for public housing in suburbs north of Paris spanning Saint-Ouen, Saint-Denis and L’Ile Saint Denis. It has been conceived as a low carbon neighbourhood for the next decades as temperatures rise.

The site includes its own mini water treatment centre which will collect and purify wastewater that can be used on the gardens. One experimental building, known as “the cycle building”, will use purified rainwater for its toilets, which are designed to separate out urine and faeces that can then be converted into fertilisers.

“We see it simply as a step on the path, not as the definitive model, on a new way to build for tomorrow,” said Antoine du Souich, director of strategy and innovation at Solideo, the authority delivering venues and infrastructure for the Games. “But the fact that we have done this on budget, on time – buildings that would have taken four years of conception and six years to build, we’ve done it in four years, that shows it can be done.”

The key question for this summer’s Games is air-conditioning in the Olympic Village. The village was built in such a way as to do without air-conditioning. Whereas the Tokyo Games had air-conditioning units in every room, in Paris there are none. There is high-performance insulation and sun shades, as well as reversible underfloor plumbing linked to a local geothermal power plant that draws cool water from beneath the surface during the summer and heat from far underground in the winter.

However, some sporting delegations, such as the US, who may be concerned about Paris’s recent record-breaking summers, could decide to hire portable ventilators or portable air-conditioners just in case.

The carbon footprint of the Games is a political issue in Paris, with the Socialist mayor, Anne Hidalgo, making it part of her mission statement and advising the French oil firm Total against being a sponsor. But questions remain over some issues such as details of carbon offsetting and the methodology of counting the carbon footprint.

The main challenge remains the scale of a global sporting event which involves spectators taking flights from across the world. Even if some nearby teams, such as the UK, the Netherlands, Belgium and Switzerland, travel by train, a considerable part of the carbon footprint will be fans flying in from faraway places such as the US or China.

César Dugast, senior manager at Carbone 4 climate consultancy, said it was time to rethink the model of the global sporting event. “In general the Paris organisers have made some commendable efforts to reduce the carbon footprint within the old, historic model of the Olympic Games. But the real question is whether that model is actually compatible with our planet’s limits and the Paris climate agreement. The elephant in the room is international air travel – an event on this scale with so many spectators flying from every corner of the world to one place means enormous carbon emissions on transport.”

He said: “It’s time to totally reinvent the Games, for example dividing different sports across several cities across the world, meaning spectators would be local, and other sports can be followed on TV or in fan-zones. There are lots of ways the Olympic Games can be reinvented so they can really step up to the challenge of the climate crisis.”