PARIS (AFP) – The stands have fallen quiet and the Athletes’ Village is emptying. What happens to all the equipment now the 2024 Paris Olympics are over? Organisers have plans for it.
Over decades, the Olympics have forged a reputation for monumental waste, with whole stadiums sometimes left to rot once the two-week sporting extravaganza moves on.
But Paris promised to do things differently, using temporary venues to cut construction work but also forcing suppliers to think about a “second life” for the equipment they supplied, from tennis balls to the sand for the beach volleyball.
“Before we ordered anything, we thought about what this thing is going to become afterwards,” Paris 2024 sustainability Director Georgina Grenon told AFP in an interview last week.
The approach is new for a major global sports event, with her team initially looking for ideas they could copy from FIFA football tournaments or past Olympics before deciding they needed to invent one themselves.
“We also hired consultants and nobody could tell us if this had been done before,” explained Grenon, whose team involves an expert in the so-called “circular economy”. The first step was drawing up an inventory of everything they needed for the biggest show on earth.
“It’s as if you’re organising a wedding. If you know you have 100 guests, then you need 10 tables, 100 chairs etc,” she said. The Paris Olympics involved 32 different sports and around 10 million spectators.
“We made the list and it amounted to about six million things, six million objects,” she explained.
At the start of the procurement process, every time Paris 2024 issued a tender, they included a clause asking the supplier to propose a second life for their products.
“We did this so that they could understand that we were not just looking to buy an object. Then it was up to them to propose us the best model,” said Grenon.
Many of the facilities and much of the equipment used for the Olympics will be immediately redeployed for the Paralympics, which run from August 28 to September 8.
But after that, they will head to new homes. The extra-fine sand used for the beach volleyball court in front of the Eiffel Tower, one of the Games’ iconic venues, has been promised to a club in the Paris region. Paris 2024 logos are set to be scrubbed off podiums so that they can be used elsewhere.
The 600,000 items of office furniture leased from French company Lyreco will be taken back and used by the firm to launch a new second-hand furniture business.
The more than 14,000 mattresses made from recycled plastic used in the Olympic Village will be given to the French army, while their cardboard bases will be recycled. The tennis balls used at Roland-Garros, including those hit by teary gold medal-winner Novak Djokovic, will be donated to French sports clubs, as will much of the other sports equipment from javelins to shot puts.
Grenon said the organising committee have confirmed second-life plans for 90 per cent of their six million items, with final deals being worked out for the remainder. Part of their plans involve providing opportunities for fans to buy souvenirs, including the flags used during medal presentations or torches made for the relay before the Games.
