The Olympics are awesome, and although I don't like to spend hours and hours watching TV, I usually end up watching as many of the events as I can. I also don't like seeing the same five commercials over and over and over again from McDonalds and BP and Coke, so I decided this year to mute the commercials and do some investigation as to how green "the greenest games in history" really are. That way I don't feel so lazy for watching TV all day haha.
The Olympic games buildings are by far the greatest accomplishment for London Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games and Paralympic Games (LOCOG). They have been built not only to be a sustainable platform for this olympics, but for years to come when they open up to the British public. At the same time they failed to meet their marks in many valuable categories. The LOCOG use a variety of energy saving techniques that will save millions of dollars over the years, save tons of coal from being burned, and conserve water which will come to be one of the most valuable resources of this planet once the population continues to rise. Furthermore the park will only become more beautiful and naturally integrated into the landscape as the years go on. I will highlight some of the key efficiency features of some of the buildings.
The copper box is one of the most efficient buildings at these London olympics. It is made of 3,000 meters of copper, 65% of which is taken from recycled piping from previous construction projects, that give it an iconic bronze look. To reduce the lighting costs, it utilizes 90 light pipes that provide natural sunlight during the daytime, to cut lighting costs by some 40%. The rooftop of the Copper Box is sloped, and collects rainwater to be used in the showers and bathrooms. This will greatly supplement the amount of water needed and cut water costs and usage again by 40%. As the population increases over the next thirty years water will become a scarce resource, so this is an extremely important architectural aspect that can and will be used in sustalinable buildings of the future.
The Velodrome, which will house all of the track cycling events, is another great example of some green architecture. This building is the most efficient building of the entire games. The actual track is supposed to be the fastest in the world and is made of 100% legally and sustainably sourced timber. The overall building is 30% more efficient than the standards set in 2006 Building Regulations Part L. Compact building design was used to minimized the amount of air that needs to be heated or cooled. Secondly, the Velodrome has maximal southwest window exposure. Consequently, the velodrome uses natural sun-lighting along with passive solar heating, so on a cold sunny day, heating costs will be minimized, as well as lighting costs. Obviously, energy efficiency LED lights are used throughout to reduce energy demands and carbon footprint. Once again, the Velodrome uses an iconic and unique curving sloped roof that will collect potable water and reduce the water consumption of the building by up to 60%. It kind of looks like a big potato chip! Water efficient fittings and sanitary ware, along with waterless urinals further the water savings of the Velodrome. Finally, the engineering team minimized the size and depth of the foundations and created a lightweight cable system to amplify their strength, which minimized the amount of concrete used in the building, which by far is the most carbon intensive building materials in the world.
Velodrome (top), BMX race course next to Velodrome (bottom)
Concrete creates .75 tons of CO2 per ton of concrete in energy use, along with another .50 tons of CO2 used to calcify the limestone used in the process, which equals 1.25 tons of CO2 per ton of concrete used. Therefore, minimizing the amount of concrete used in the construction process greatly reduces the carbon footprint of building. Creating even more CO2 emission reductions, 90% of the materials used to build the venues were brought in by train, which greatly reduces the amount of fuel needed compared to using trucks to bring in the materials.
One thing I don’t really like about the Olympics is the fact that is uses a new host country every year. The reason that London won the Olympics in the first place was due to the fact that they promised the greenest games ever, and proposed an initial overall operations costs of around 4 Billion dollars. This of course was a political lowball and was nowhere near the actual numbers The actual cost ended up being around 15 Billion. If we just picked like 5 or 6 permanent host cities, the carbon costs of the olympics would only be a fraction of the current costs, as around 50% of the total carbon costs of the olympics is used during the construction process. But that wouldn’t be very fun would it? I doubt that will ever happen.
One unnecessary cost of these olympics is the water polo arena; this is the first time that there has ever been an entire building dedicated to water polo. Does that sound like something that the greenest olympics ever would do? Anyways one thing that is green about the water polo arena is that is entirely sustainable. It is created from nearly 100% Poly Vinyl Chloride (PVC), and will be deconstructed once the games are over and recycled in other construction projects. To me that is a huge step for the olympic future, one that should be replicated in games to come. If they could find a way to build all of the olympic structure from PVC, even though it probably wouldn’t be so exciting or breathtaking, the buildings would be nearly Carbon-Zero, which I think is much more breathtaking than a twisted metal monstrosity that the Britons like to think of as creative architecture. Looks more like an ugly transformer.
Water Polo Arena
The basketball arena is another great example of temporary green building. It is composed entirely of recycled steel and PVC, and similarly will be taken down once the olympics are over and repurposed for other building projects. It is more of a tent with scaffolding than a building, and utilizes 20,000 square meters of white PVC material.
Basketball Arena
Those are some prime examples of sustainable building techniques used in the London Olympics, and while innovative and prime examples of ways to reduce carbon footprints and energy intensity of future olympic games, overall I am quite disappointed with the outcome of the so-called “greenest olympics in history”.
First let me point to two prime symbolic failures in these olympics. The Olympic Torch. The London Organizing Committee of the Olympic Games and Paralympic Games (LOGOC) promised that the torch, as a symbol of the games dedication to a sustainable games, would be entirely carbon-neutral. In an embarrassing PR scandal, this was a completely empty promise. The torch arrived on a gold-plated private British Airways aircraft known as The Firefly. I mean what a fucking waste of gold! The gold probably came from the same Salt Lake City Rio Tinto mine that provided the metal for all of the medals, which is famous for causing life-threatening air and water pollution there as well as at other locations around the world. In June 2011, Électricité de France (EDF), announced that it would not be able to supply a low carbon fuel for the olympic torch. The promise of a low carbon torch was made in 2007, and the fact that they were not able to deliver on this is a powerful message to the world about how sustainable the entire London games actually are. They had 5 years to try and make a low carbon fuel for the torch. Really? Something that in the massive nature of the undertaking is just a drop in the bucket, but in the grand message has such great implications, and they couldn't get it right? Comon LOCOG y'all screwed up big time.
London Olympic Cauldrom
Secondly, and much more importantly, the London bid committee promised that the London Games would be powered 20% by renewable energy sources. A vast majority of this power was supposed to come from a large wind farm that would be built north of the olympic park. Great! The weather in London sucks ass, so build a wind farm to at least take advantage of the fact that the weather is terrible and in no way suitable for the summer olympics (any place where the volleyball players have to wear shirts and pants under their bikinis is unacceptable in my opinion) and build a wind farm to supply the power! Massive wind farms, on a side note, play an integral role in a sustainable future for England. So anyways, recent legislation, passed in 2011, made the design of the specific wind turbine to be used a safety and health liability...is that ironic enough for you?? To put this into an economic and more understandable form, wind power at the moment costs about 10 cents per kilowatt hour as opposed to two or three cents for coal sourced electricity; this metric means that in order to use wind power for 20% of overall energy use, the total cost for the energy bill would be doubled. Nearly all of that cost comes in the initial capital required to build the turbines. So I’ll dig a lil bit deeper. The London Games were running ridiculously over budget (at the time around 7 Billion dollars over), and out of left-field comes new laws that make the wind farm that they were supposed to build illegal for health and safety reasons. Hmmm...sounds a scosh dodgey to me, right-o chum? Without the wind farm the percentage of renewable energy dropped from 20% 0f total to a mere 9%.
To make up for all of the renewable energy that will not be available, the LOCOG will compensate by carbon credit compensation. In essence this means that the LOCOG will give money to various renewable energy projects in developing countries. The main problem with carbon credits is that they are basically a way for developed countries to pay for their pollution. While it is great that this means there is more capital available for developing countries, there is little to no impact on current carbon emissions levels, which at this point in time are in the red zone for causing drastic environmental changes across the world (global warming is real, see earlier posts). Did the Britons falsely promise the world an example of carbon reduction to serve as a guide for future games just so they could lure the olympic committee to choose their cold little rock island as the host city? You be the judge. It seems to me that the London bid committee severely under-bid $4 Billion to win the olympics, and then went way over budget and slashed the renewable energy plan, to give more of the money to cheaper fossil fuels provided by....wait who was that sponsor again...oh yeah BP energy. The dirtiest company on the planet. Irony is can be perfectly despicable sometimes! Not to get too negative, but nearly all of the sponsors of the olympics have no business being associated in any way with the greatest athletes in the world. For example, I don’t think that any of the athletes competing in these games have been eating any McDonalds or drinking Coke during their training. Except for Usain Bolt, who claims that he ate a chicken rap from Mickey D’s as a pre-game meal before winning the 100 meter dash and cementing in history his role as one of the fastest people in history. I appreciate a true star who wins by a mile and then rubs it in his teammates face! Sometimes a little showmanship makes the night a little more exciting.
Back to the “greenest olympics in history”, an event which has all the showmanship that Usain does and more, but cannot deliver the win like the Bolt.
Before I focus on the silver lining that we can look forward to in the future.
Another green promise that London made was that 25% of the construction wastes would be recycled, making the carbon footprint much smaller. Despite this goal, construction energy use and wastes account for more than half of the carbon footprint of the olympic games, which is conservatively estimated to be about 4 million tons of CO2. Unfortunately, due to discrepancies and inaccuracies in measuring techniques, it is impossible to compare this to the most recent Beijing summer olympics and Athens games. I will assume that this is definitely lower than Beijing's number, which left a massive metal birds nest in its aftermath, that I don't see any giant metal birds coming to reuse in future metal bird's nests, despite Beijing's claims that it would be greener than the rest. Leaving decaying useless buildings to rot away is just a waste of the Earth’s body.
As I touched on earlier, the Rio Tinto mines that supply the metal for the athletes medals are infamous for spewing toxic wastes into the air and water and causing a huge number of deaths to those unfortunate to work in and live near the Rio Tinto mines. This guy went to the mines to see what the damage looks like http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/peopleandpower/2012/06/201262075757520106.html This years medals are the largest and heaviest in the history of the games, which once again is a great example of the hypocrisy of the “greenest games in history”. Each gold medal is comprised of 92.5% silver and 1.34% gold while the rest is copper; this puts at least 6 grams of gold in each medal. Silver meda is 92.5% silver with the remainder copper and the bronze is 97.5% copper, 2.5% zinc and .5% tin. So totaled up there is 370 grams of silver for a goldor silver, multiplied by the current medal count for the top 5 teams gives you 166,500 grams of silver used so far on August 10th.
2012 Medals
The Salt Lake City Rio Tinto mine is the largest man made hole on the planet, and produces all of the gold, silver and copper for the medals, which greatly contributes to SLC’s position as having some of the worst acute air pollution in the US. The mine will continue to expand, despite lawsuits against if for violating the Clean Air Act...i wonder why....money and crooked politicians for sure have nothing to do with that!
Ok enough of the negativity, time to take out the telescope and zoom in on the silver lining surrounding the acid storm cloud of the “greenest games in history”.
BMW i8
Electric cars!
I love em! Especially the Tesla S and Tesla X and the roadster of course. Anyways BMW is the main vehicle sponsor of the London games and provides transportation for all of the athletes. They provided 400 cars total, with 200 of these being completely electric. The EV’s are comprised of 160 ActiveEs, the electric 1-series coupe, and 40 Mini Es. There are also 120 5-series hybrids in the fleet. In order to support this fleet of EV's EDF, the clean energy sponsor of the games, built a number of electric charging stations throughout London! These charging stations will remain active after the games, providing the beginning of an electric station infrastructure that will provide the skeleton for an all EV London in the years to come. I'll provide a future blog post on how awesome EV's are in the future, but for now let me just assure you that the average person only drives around 40 miles in their daily commute and an EV can do that for you easily. BMW also has their first all electric dealership located at the games, which is another great step. Unfortunately, despite the BMW EV push for the games, I haven't seen yet one commercial for EV's in the United States, which I think is a failure. Im guessing that the Rio Games will be the platform Beemer uses to push their electric agenda in the US, if they choose to sponsor those games as well.
BMW Electric Scooter
There are hints that BMW will debut their i-series (electric series, check out the sexy and powerful i8 here http://www.bmw-i.com/en_ww/bmw-i8/ ) in the US next year, personally I think their electric scooter is pretty baller, and with an 8 kW battery it should have more than enough range.
Finally on the car front, there is a fleet of state-of-the-art electric hydrogen fuel cell classic London taxi cabs that will operate during the games and can provide two days of full use off of just one charge. Unfortunately for safety reasons the London Hydrogen charging station was closed for repair, and the cabs must be loaded on diesel trucks and transported 200 miles round trip to be refueled in another town. This is another letdown, but still I think definitely a step in the right direction. Cabs spend more time on the road than any other vehicle, and if we could swap out all of the current cabs in major cities with hydrogen fuel cell cabs then millions of tons of CO2 could be cut from the yearly human emissions level.
On to my favorite part, the marshmallows! And by marshmallows I mean the ground the Olympic Park is built upon. The Olympic Park occupies a patch of ground in East London that used to be an abandoned industrial wasteland. The soil in this patch of London used to be so contaminated that you could grow a nuclear weapon right out of the ground with a little TLC. The soil reclamation was one of the most carbon intensive parts of the project, as a team of civil engineers led an effort that cleaned two million tons of dirty soil! The dirt was heavily contaminated with lead, arsenic, mercury, oil, and other industrial contaminants. The soil was transported to a cleaning facility, sorted according to size and then went through a barrage of cleaning and scrubbing techniques, called remediation. Samples were taken from each batch of cleaned soil and tested in labs until it met the standards set forth by the committee The LOCOG set a goal of re-using 80% of the soil from the site, and amazingly was able to beat their goal and 85% of the contaminated soil was completely cleaned.
Olympic Park
Apartments in Olympic Plaza
In designing the Olympic Park for sustainability, soil erosion planning played a large part in the layout of plants and trees chosen. London receives a lot of rain, and combined with the fact the Olympic Park is located right next to the Thames river, there would be much water runoff down the banks of the river. For that reason, water 4,000 semi-mature trees that have been grown at a farm for ten years were transported and planted along the banks of the park. Funderneath the trees 300,000 wetland plants grown in Norfolk with a reed mat technique were planted along the bottom of the band to soak up all of the extra water flow that the trees aren't able to absorb. This erosion planning will protect 5,000 riverside properties from flooding now and long into the future.
Finally, the London Games served as the testing site of a new greenhouse gas sampling device. Currently many companies self-report CO2 emissions and the complex algorithms used to evaluate ppm CO2 often give numbers that are way off on the low side. A Stanford professor along with venture capital support has developed a machine that sucks in air, and shoots a laser through a small sample which triggers different frequencies when striking methane, ethane, or carbon-dioxide. He has 6 of the sensors in place ($70,000 apiece) at the London Games. One is on an airplane above the city, another on the front of a bus, and four other sensor placed at strategic points where wind concentrates large amounts of city air. If his new technology is sound, it will give us a data point to which we can compare the Rio Games in 2016 much more accurately. This is awesome because in the past there has been no standard of measurement to give accurate GHG numbers from Beijing or Athens.
New Advanced Greenhouse Gas analyzer from Los Gator Research, Bay area company
There are a lot of other green engineering feats that the LOCOG accomplished but Im too lazy to find any more.
My favorite part of the entire idea is that the park will only get fuller and more beautiful as the years go on. The new park along with the new athletic venues will be a legacy that the London public can use once the games are finished, and new businesses are expected to move into the area to capitalize on the new human traffic. As the plantlife grows to fill in the Olympic Park it will become repopulated by native grasslife animals. We will be be leaving a building site that serves both the people and the animals equally well.
This is in stark contrast to the Beijing Olympic site, which is rotting away in disuse, and a terrible waste of material. The Legacy of the Olympic Park in London is that it will serve as a "green lung" for London, which has little greenery currently to soak up all of the pollution they produce. London is one of the most carbon intensive cities on the planet, producing 400 million tons of CO2 per year, so hopefully the park will have a positive impact and mitigate some of the pollution from the city. There isn't enough data to know how long it will take for the living park to mitigate the 4 million tons of Carbon Dioxide that will be caused from the increased transportation, heat, and AC levels during the the 2012 Games.
Beijing Bird's Nest is rarely used. Even so it has fared better than the other venues.
The main idea of the sustainable games in London is for citizens and companies to have a smaller carbon footprint. At least in spirit they created somewhat of a legacy with some of the great green architecture and greengineering. There is a logistical increase in the amount of energy peo`ple in developed countries like the US and England according to how much wealth they acquire.; developing countries such as China and India have hella people and as their average GDP continues to rise at 10% rates they will soon be putting out much more greenhouse gases. At current consumption rates, a Londonner would need three planet Earth's to support their lifestyle. These games focus on a "one planet games" or in other words a carbon emissions and resource requirement that if adopted by everyone would require only one (1) planet Earth to sustain us, which is a good idea because in reality we only have one (1) planet to waste.
If you made congratulations then thanks for reading! Here is dat gangsta frizzle shizzle for nizzle.
