After the gold rush

Imagine the proud athlete standing on the podium receiving a gold medal and the traditional bouquet in the London Olympic Stadium. The tearful pride during the national anthem brings a lump to the throat of hundreds of millions of TV viewers around the world.

As Chair of the Commission for a Sustainable London 2012 the lump in my throat will be for a different reason. My thoughts will be: “I wonder what happens to the podium after the games? Where does it go? Where did the flowers come from? Were they from a water-stressed region of the world? Were they grown by people employed under decent conditions? Maybe they are not flowers at all but something that looks like flowers made from recycled paper?” (A serious suggestion made by the London Wildlife Trust). As the official assurance body for a sustainable London 2012, my small team asks these and other questions on a daily basis.

Waste is a massive subject for London 2012. The indicators to date are very good but the challenges are huge.

The Olympic Delivery Authority (ODA) is the organisation responsible for constructing the facilities. With respect to waste performance, it is breaking records with the regularity of Usain Bolt. It has achieved ground-breaking performance during the demolition and remediation stage of the project, comfortably exceeding the 90 per cent target for waste diverted from landfill. The construction stage is looking good too; the 90 per cent target set by waste partner Veolia beats the previous best practice for Heathrow Terminal 5, and after a difficult start on site, this objective looks set to be achieved.

The London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games (LOCOG) is responsible for staging the games and has set a breathtaking target to achieve zero waste to landfill during the games period. Given that there will be 7.8 million visitors to the events, this is a huge challenge. Plans are underway to set out how this will be achieved and we look forward to reviewing them.

But what about all the temporary materials: the medal podiums (or podia, strictly speaking); the temporary furniture in the athletes’ village; the tensile plastic wrap and temporary roofing material (enough to wrap the Canary Wharf Tower twice)? The quantity of waste involved here is not yet defined and we don’t know where it will go. We do know that LOCOG will lease as much material as possible and there are innovative approaches for some temporary buildings such as the Water Polo centre, where the supplier will take it back after use and reuse it somewhere else. We have recommended that this subject be reviewed in our latest annual report and we will continue to monitor progress through our forthcoming review of waste management.

We also need to consider the area around the Olympic Park. Some of the host boroughs have the worst recycling rates in the country and the issue of litter and waste disposal in the local community is high on the agenda of the local authorities.

There is significant concern about waste to energy. We are disappointed that an ultra-modern energy centre will be built on the assumption that the CHP system will be powered by natural gas, not biogas. The abundance of sources of food waste in the area and the absence of anaerobic digestion facilities in East London surely present an opportunity to think outside the box with regard to waste planning and provide a source of fuel that can potentially power the Olympic Park for the next 40 years. An achievement such as this in 2012, the Kyoto year, will demonstrate to the world that the UK is serious about this issue and has the capability to deliver solutions. A good start has been made, but there is much to be done to avoid a sea of litter and an ocean of waste sent to landfill after the gold rush.

Though in the Olympics, ‘the essential thing is not to have conquered but to have fought well’, Shaun McCarthy thinks the essential thing for the Commission for a Sustainable London 2012 is to conquer the waste the games leave in their wake