Will the Paris Olympics Earn a Gold in Sustainability?

By Peter Aronson

The organizers of the 2024 Paris Olympics claim these games will be the most sustainable in history.

That may very well end up being the case, as organizers aim to reduce the carbon footprint by 50 percent from previous summer games, by cutting emissions and waste related to construction, facilities, transportation, food, procurement and energy use.

But others claim that the Paris Olympics, like all huge international sporting events (the Olympics, the World Cup), which require vast resources to put on and propel millions to use air travel to attend, can’t help but be bad for the environment. An article in Scientific American even went so far as to use the headline “The Paris Olympics are a lesson in Greenwashing.”

Analyzing the sustainability of the 2024 Paris games depends on your perspective.

The Paris Olympics, if the organizers and all their written reports can be believed, will almost certainly use less energy and leave less of a carbon footprint than the summer games in London 2012 and Rio 2016. (For some reason, Tokyo 2021 was left out of the analysis.) But the games will still leave a significant carbon footprint, because huge events involving millions of people have no choice. Buildings are constructed, vast amounts of resources and energy are used and an estimated 10 million people will visit France for the games, with many millions using air travel.

Flying, by far, leaves the largest carbon footprint per mile traveled of any mode of transportation.

The Plan   

The organizers of the Paris Olympics and the Paralympics that follow have outlined how these games will be the most sustainable in history. In presenting a multi-point plan, they highlight that these games will be the first Olympics aligned with the 2015 Paris Agreement on Climate change, which has a goal of holding the world to a post-industrial global warming of no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit.) 

“Venue by venue, the organizers created a detailed map of required resources, aiming to minimize them and control their life cycle before, during and after the Games,” the Paris 2024 report states. “From spectator seating to tents, beds, chairs, tables and even tennis balls – every asset has been meticulously planned.”

The Paris organizers say that it will use 100 percent renewable energy during the games and apply a “circular-economy strategy” based on the principles of using fewer resources for the games and ensuring reuse of many of the resources after the games. For example, 95 percent of the competition venues are pre-existing or temporary. The new aquatics center will rely on solar panels for energy and will be used to serve the local community after the games. Three quarters of the two million pieces of sports equipment needed for the games will be rented or provided temporarily by sports federations, and the same percentage applies to all electronic equipment, including computers and printers. 

In addition, the Olympic Village, which will house 14,250 athletes during the games, will be transformed after the games to a new residential and business district for 6,000 workers and 6,000 residents, with a quarter reserved for public housing.

During the Olympics and Paralympics, 13 million meals are expected to be served, with organizers striving to deliver meals with half the carbon footprint than the average French meal. They hope to accomplish this by doubling the amount of plant-based ingredients and options for athletes, spectators and the Olympic workforce; by sourcing 80 percent of all ingredients from local agriculture sources; by cutting food waste; by reducing the use of single-use plastic; and by reusing catering equipment and food infrastructure after the games. 

In addition, most of the Paris sporting events will be conducted within a short distance of each other (more than 80 percent of the Olympic venues are within about six miles of the Olympic Village), minimizing travel distance for athletes and spectators and allowing the use of public transportation.

Vehicles shuttling athletes to and from events will include electric, hybrid and hydrogen-powered vehicles.

However, there is one notable controversial exception to the venue locations. The surfing competition will be held in Tahiti (the Seine is not known for its waves!), and the local Tahitian population has complained that constructing facilities for the event will hurt marine life. And then, of course, there’s the air travel (and carbon burned) to get to Tahiti, 9,765 miles away from Paris. 

Different Perspectives

In an article for Forbes.com, Claire Poole, founder of Sport Positive in London, whose work centers on encouraging global sports organizations to take action on climate change, environmental justice and biodiversity, wrote about “Five innovative ways the Paris Olympics are going green.” 

She focused on the use of 95 percent existing venues; the Olympic medals being partially composed of recycled metal from the Eiffel Tower; coffee tables made from recycled badminton shuttlecocks and chairs made from recycled bottle caps; the planned reuse of 620,000 items, including 180,000 clothes hangers, 16,000 beds and 7,000 toilet brushes; and the use of electric boats during opening ceremony on the Seine.

“These efforts sit against a backdrop of wider environmental issues such as heat concerns for athletes and spectators, how clean the Seine water is for swimming and calls for major environmental changes from sponsors,” Poole wrote.

The harshest criticism comes from individuals like Jules Boykoff, a political science professor at Pacific University and the author of six books on the Olympics. Writing in Scientific American he said “The organizers of the games say that in light of climate change, they’ve made sustainability a centerpiece of their enterprise. Channeling their inner Greta Thunberg, they promise that the event will be ‘historic for the climate’ and ‘revolutionary Games’ like we’ve never seen before.

“Yet in the city where global leaders signed a landmark agreement in 2015 to limit postindustrial global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, we’re getting a recycled version of green capitalism that is oblivious in its incrementalism, vague with its methodology and loose with its accountability. It’s too late for Paris, but if the Olympic organizers truly want to be sustainable, the Games need to reduce their size, limit the number of tourists who travel from afar, thoroughly greenify their capacious supply chains and open up their eco-books for bona fide accountability. Until then, the Olympics are a greenwash, a pale bit of lip service delivered at a time when climatological facts demand a systematic transformation in splendid Technicolor.”

He said the key question to consider is whether the Olympics can ever “truly be an environmentally sustainable event?”

The answer, he said, by many who study this issue today is that a sustainable model for the Olympics does not yet exist.

And he cited a report from environmental watchdogs Carbon Market Watch and Eclaircies, who have criticized the Paris Olympics for a “lack of transparency and precision” for their claim of using 100 percent renewable energy. Boykoff, quoting the report, wrote that opacity “ ‘… makes it impossible to analyze the true impact of the Olympics’ strategy on climate change.’ ”    

Matthew Huber, a professor of geography and the environment at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, points out the irrationality of some conservation efforts, citing the organizers decision not to provide air conditioning for athletes in the Olympic Village, so less energy would be used. 

“Prohibiting AC is leading to inefficient and haphazard efforts on the part of some countries to bring their own AC,” Huber said, with the United States, England, Germany and Italy among the nations bringing their own units. “It would be much more rational and efficient to simply provide centralized AC to all participants.”

It’s unlikely that a global event like the Olympics, involving millions of people and billions of dollars, could ever satisfy ardent environmentalists.

However, in analyzing how global warming is impacting the summer and winter Olympics and other international sporting events, Brian P. McCullough focused on the silver lining. McCullough, an associate professor of sports management at the University of Michigan, argued in The Conversation that while the Paris Olympics certainly has its environmental detractors, he says that by promoting sustainability and taking significant steps to be sustainable, the 2024 games have the potential to have an outsize impact.

“Such campaigns can influence people’s everyday behaviors and even increase their advocacy for sustainability in their home communities,” McCullough wrote. 

He said efforts to scale back these large, international events are misguided. “… [E]nding spectator sports as we know them, overlook the ability of sports to influence and change human behavior,” he wrote. “In essence, the Olympic Games, the largest sporting event in the world, is a sport sustainability world’s fair. It highlights what is possible for a sporting event through collaborations with international corporations to reduce its environmental impact. And it influences others to follow suit, whether that is other sporting events, leagues and federations or spectators from around the world.”

Peter Aronson, a volunteer writer at the New York League of Conservation Voters since September 2022, is a former journalist and retired attorney. He is the author of Mandalay Hawk’s Dilemma: The United States of Anthropocene, a novel for middle-grade readers about kids fighting global warming. Kirkus Reviews, in a starred review, wrote: “A scathing work and an essential blueprint for youth battling climate change.” To read more about Peter, visit his website www.peteraronsonbooks.com or to purchase his book, click here.