Greening the Games

The environmental benefits of sustainability planning are already being realised on the Olympic Park in London

“When I first heard that London was going to bid for the Games I thought: ‘Oh no! That means everyone is going to be flying here and I’m not sure I like the sound of this’,” says Sue Riddlestone, director of BioRegional (www.bioregional.com), the not-for-profit organisation that has worked on guiding and helping to implement the sustainability strategy for London 2012 through the pre-bid stages to the current construction phases.

However, Riddlestone quickly recognised the potential of the Olympic and Paralympic Games to bring huge environmental benefits, both locally and globally. “I had a look around the Lower Lea Valley and I thought: ‘That is just what this place needs.’ There are fantastic people living in the East End of London; it’s got so much potential, with the River Lea and lots of land and yet it’s criss-crossed with train-lines and very busy roads and needs regenerating.

Renewable energy is contributing towards the aim of lowering carbon dioxide
emissions during and after Games

“Another thing that also swayed me a bit is that, because London is such a multicultural city, there would be people living in London who would be able to see and support their country without travelling, simply because they live here.” 2012 also provides London with an opportunity to showcase sustainable approaches to transport. “The aim is to have a car-free Games, in terms of visitors. London will try to lead the way on this by encouraging people to come in by train or bus or to walk or cycle. The public transport infrastructure that’s going in will support this ambition.

Even people coming over from mainland Europe will be arriving by train at the newly opened St Pancras International Station. This will be a mere seven minutes away from the Olympic Park, thanks to the high speed Javelin train that will run at Games time.

Riddlestone also saw that London 2012 had the potential to raise the profile of sustainability issues on a much broader level. “If sustainable regeneration takes place as part of the Games, so many more people hear about it. It’s a real chance to amplify the message and reach people that you wouldn’t reach otherwise.”

Bringing sustainability to the bid
Such a major challenge required support from a very high level. It was fortunate that Riddlestone was, and is, one of London Mayor Ken Livingstone’s 20 Sustainable Development Commissioners.

More than 150 buildings in the Olympic Park have been
surveyed to identify materials fit for reuse

“When London decided to bid for the games, Ken Livingstone asked the Sustainable Development Commission to get involved. We spent a lot of time working with various consultants, such as EDAW, Buro Happold, as well as the Greater London Authority (GLA) and the London Development Authority (LDA) and attending various stakeholder events. We provided input to what they were doing and made suggestions as to how the plans could be more sustainable.”

While London was preparing to bid for the Games, BioRegional was developing an approach to sustainability called One Planet Living. This is a global initiative based on 10 principles of sustainability developed by BioRegional and the Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF).

“One Planet Living is a holistic approach to how to live in a sustainable way. It comes from the idea that we are consuming more resources than the planet can sustain,” Riddlestone says. “There is only a certain amount of bio-productive land and fisheries on the planet and certain amount of atmosphere to absorb all our waste. If everyone in the world lived as we do in the UK we would need three planets to support us.”

At the heart of the approach is a sense of equity between people and wildlife. “What we need all over the world is one planet living – living within the means of what the planet can sustain and leaving a bit of space for wildlife and wilderness as well.”

BioRegional was also behind the development of BedZED, an award-winning eco-village in London. “We took a very holistic approach, not just towards reducing energy use in the buildings but also the impact that people have when they live in the buildings. BedZED and our other projects have shown how we can achieve sustainability and One Planet Living and that it can be cost effective. Surveys have also shown that people can be happier in a sustainable community, as they know more neighbours.”

The organisation went on to apply its sustainability expertise, developed through One Planet Living and its work at BedZED, to the Olympic and Paralympic Games. “We are applying the 10 One Planet Living principles that we’ve developed with WWF International towards a sustainability framework for the Games. London 2012 asked us to write a sustainability strategy, which was called ‘Towards a One Planet Olympics’.” This forms part of a binding commitment to the International Olympic Committee. WWF stepped forward and presented the International Olympic Committee with this strategy, which was then adopted as part of London’s bid.

“It is fantastic that, from a very early stage, the Mayor said sustainability was very important and it got woven in at the very early stages. People who worked on sustainability during the bid – not just BioRegional and WWF but also people now working at LOCOG – are still working on it now, so there’s continuity.”

Planning for the future
The main motivation behind BioRegional’s involvement in London 2012 was legacy. “For me, the bid was all about the legacy and what this would do for the East End of London. Looking around the Lea Valley made me feel that this was important; that the regeneration wouldn’t happen without the Games,” Riddlestone says.

London 2012’s current sustainability strategy sets forward a series of targets for the Games and beyond. One such aspiration is to reduce the overall carbon emissions associated with the built environment in the Olympic Park by 50 per cent by 2013.

“Any renewable energy infrastructure will be developed as the construction goes on. It’s early days – feasibility studies are going on as to how to achieve this. It is expected that there will be a wind turbine on the north of the Olympic Park site and that there will be a combined cooling heat and power plant on-site. The ambition is there to ensure that any infrastructure works for the legacy. A lot of groundwork is being done.”

The Olympic Park will act as habitat for species, some of which are rare and endangered. There have been, and will continue to be, surveys to monitor and assess the wildlife in the park, including newts, kingfishers, bats and blackstarts.

The park will also act as a natural flood mitigation strategy. Introducing a green corridor along the river will prevent riverside homes from being flooded. EDAW, the landscape masterplanners for the event, developed a whole vision for the park to be continued from the Lea Valley Park and brought all the way to the Thames alongside the river Lea.

Deconstruction and rebuilding
A major part of the sustainability strategy for London 2012 is a target to reuse or recycle at least 90 per cent of all material resulting from the deconstruction of buildings on the site of the Olympic Park. Reusing and recycling material in this way brings huge carbon savings and savings of materials.

Liz Darley, sustainability consultant at BioRegional and a civil engineering graduate of Cambridge University, says: “We’ve surveyed more than 150 buildings where we’ve identified particular materials that could be reused. These surveys are fed through to the demolition contractors. The next step is then to discuss with potential end-users to take these materials away. Between ourselves and the demolition contractors we find someone to use the materials.”

In some cases, materials are reused on site in the new build. “In parallel to finding local people to take materials such as furniture, steel buildings, mezzanine floors and pallet racks off-site to sell, we have also been working with design teams. They are really interested in the granite and concrete curbs, for example, and bricks and bollards, which can be used for way-marking and path-finding,” Darley says.

BioRegional’s main involvement in this process so far has been to identify the opportunities that are there and to introduce potential end-users. “We sit down with the ODA and contractors and work out the feasibility of reclaiming these items, with whom and how. At the same time we have been working with the CLM consortium – that’s CH2M Hill, Laing O’Rourke and Mace – and the design teams to identify what materials they want to reuse, their availability and who can use them.

“There is only a limited amount of material available, so it’s a case of putting a designers name on the material. That’s an arrangement between the design teams and the CLM; we’ve been engaging them through workshops and site visits, getting them excited about opportunities and what can be done – and they’ve been very excited.”

Materials are being reused on site wherever possible. The majority of materials being reused for the Games are landscaping materials: setts, curbs and bollards for roads and pathways for Olympic Park’s streetscape. “The things to look for are thickness and cracking. The biggest safety issue for curbs is whether there is going to be a trip hazard,” Darley says.

A lot of work has been going into keeping some of the industrial heritage of the area, notably through retaining the yellow stock brickwork that is so characteristic of London. Great efforts are being made to recover as much of this brickwork as possible, with great potential for reusing it in some of the new buildings.

Although there are no plans so far to reuse steel for the Games, the site contains a number of steel portal-frame buildings which are going off-site. The materials to be reused include the steel frame, the cladding and mezzanine floors.

“We’ve done a lot of work in the past with structural engineers on developing testing methods for testing structural steel using visual testing and assessing the grade of the steel against historic tables. In some cases you may need to design a slightly differently shaped section to accommodate the load that you are going to put on,” Darley says.

Safety
In order to reach this target of 90 per cent reuse and recycling, BioRegional is working closely with demolition contractors. One of the main reasons for demolition contractors doing the bulk of the work is because they have very strict safety procedures in place to dismantle safely.

“For the steel portal-frame buildings they’ve actually engaged a reclamation specialist to come in and deconstruct. They have all the systems in place – nets and harnesses and mobile work platforms – approved by the safety team for the ODA. In terms of taking things down there is a very careful system in place.”

So far, BioRegional estimates that their work with the ODA has resulted in the reclamation of approximately 2000 tonnes of material and this is set to increase daily as more and more buildings are taken down.

Sue Riddlestone says: “I just feel like London really is ahead and we’re really integrating sustainability. It’s not without its challenges – some of the challenges are in the contracts and the speed of the project. There may be many fine words, but if they don’t make it into the contract with a contractor dealing with a subcontractor, these things can get missed out.”