On Sunday, the Paris Olympics will be history. How did they go? I’m not really interested in sport (especially not in commercialised events like the Olympics), but I do care about the impact it has. So what was achieved, not from a sporting point of view, but from an environmental, ecological perspective? We have been publishing here in the Blue News a lot about Paris lately (see here), but now it is time to look back – and forward. By Roland Brunner
This morning, Anne Hidalgo, the Mayor of the Blue Community / Blue City of Paris, began to take stock of the Olympic Games (see picture down). She talked about 10 years of collective work around a solid team that has transformed the city for a long time to come.
Hosting the Olympic Games in Paris was a huge opportunity – and the city was keen to seize it. It was going to be the greenest and bluest, the most ecological Olympics ever, promised the Mayor Anne Hidalgo. With her team, particularly Dan Lert as the city’s vice-president and director of the public water company Eau de Paris, she did a tremendous job, investing in cleaning up the Seine and making it clean enough to swim in after 50 years of pollution. The efforts and the huge sums of money invested have paid off and some of the swimming competitions could take place in the river. However, on 10 August AP reported about three German swimmers falling ill after the Olympic race in the Seine (see here).
Paris also promised and promoted plastic-free games, building and expanding a vast network of water taps throughout the city, its institutions, metro stations, etc., and providing an interactive map to find them. The declared goal was to reduce by half the amount of single-use plastic compared with London 2012. However, environmental organisations like the NGO Zero Waste France soon pointed out that Paris had chosen Coca-Cola as its main sponsors, and that the company had brought in and used millions of plastic bottles, refilling them in cups that could be recycled. The American drinks giant Coca-Cola is one of the world’s top plastics producers, a key Olympic sponsor and the only company supplying the 18 million drinks at the Paris Olympic and Paralympic Games, including Coke, Fanta and Sprite, which are sold to paying spectators and provided to athletes at the edge of the pitch. This has even required an exemption from France’s anti-waste law, which bans the distribution of single-use plastic bottles in venues open to the public. The Guardian therefore headlined: “Greenwash games? French public points finger at Coca-Cola over Olympic plastic waste” (7 August). And it was a real shame to see the pictures. Clearly, the city’s promises were not kept.
Conclusion: Much has been done, but not everything has been achieved. Without the Olympic Games, however, Paris and its citizens would hardly have invested all this energy and money. Considering the achievements as a first and important step, and building on the will of the Mayor Anne Hidalgo and others to continue, I am confident that this was only a beginning. And before condemning Paris for the mistakes made and the goals not achieved, I would like to see the next big commercial events do better, building on the lessons of Paris and showing even more commitment to winning the game for all our water and nature.
Picture above: Coke being poured from a plastic bottle into a plastic cup at one of the many Coca-Cola stands at Paris 2024 Photograph: Ed Alcock/The Guardian
Picture down. Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo talking today morning on a press conference about the Paris Olympics.
