By Neena Bhandari
SYDNEY, Sep 19 2000 (IPS)

Environment has become the third pillar of the Olympic movement, alongside sports and culture, in the new millennium.

The first ever ‘Green Games’ underway in Sydney, Australia have venues designed to minimise energy use, conserve water, reduce and recycle waste, minimise pollution and protect the country’s rich biodiversity.

For instance, Homebush Bay, which is the epicentre of the Games, was once an abattoir, armaments depot, race course, brickworks and a disposal site for domestic and industrial waste. Today, it has been rejuvenated to become one of the world’s premier recreational precincts and parkland.

Creeks contained in concrete drains have become wetlands with fish, crabs and birdlife in abundance, and the endangered Green and Golden Bell frog flourishing in the brickpit reservoir.

Stadium Australia, where 110,000 spectators witnessed the grand opening ceremony Sep 15, is flexible and multi-purpose.

It allows exclusive use of natural ventilation and lighting, with giant airshafts in the grandstands generating free-running climate control to key areas. All roof water is collected and stored in four giant tanks to irrigate the pitch and supplement the buildings ‘grey’ water system.

“The design resolves complex requirements of the needs of sport, spectator and operator. The Games must have permanent venues, buildings that are a legacy and temporary venues of highest Olympic standards,” John Baker, project architect of Stadium Australia.

Standing as the third icon of the country alongside the Opera House and the Harbour Bridge, the north and south stands of Stadium Australia will be removed after the Games and Paralympics.

“The entire lower seating bowl will move inwards 15m to a new position for football matches or concerts in future,” adds Baker.

In the athletes village, there are family, courtyard and townhouses fitted with solar panels which feed back to the electricity grid. It also has an advanced solar water heating system.

The cutlery being used by the 15,000 athletes and officials is made from cornstarch. Food scraps and other biodegradable waste are being composted, which will be sold to gardeners.

Eventually, the village will become the world’s largest solar- powered suburb housing 5,000 people and a commercial centre employing 1,500 workers.

“The Olympics provided an opportunity to translate sustainable development into social, economic and environmental benefits. It has been a catalyst for change, showcasing smart green solutions,” remarks Maria Atkinson of constructors Bovis Lend Lease. “Ninety percent of building waste was recycled and reused.”

In tune with 60,000 years of Aboriginal land management, state agencies, community environment organisations and the private sector have worked toward ensuring that the events’ impacts on the environment is minimum.

Homebush Bay masterplanner and architect Lawrence Nield says: “The Games venues are usually spread throughout the host cities, but we decided to group 12 venues hosting 22 sports at Homebush Bay.”

The Barcelona and the Munich Games, two of the most acclaimed Olympics, grouped about half that number of venues together.

The use of private cars to the Olympic venues has been banned. Spectators get free travel on trains and Olympic buses running on natural gas.

The environmental aspects of the Games are not just limited to the two-week period of the Olympics.

As Duncan Armstrong, gold and silver medalist at the Seoul Games, explains: “We are planting four million trees in degraded areas around the country. It is a three-year programme involving more than 10,000 volunteers.”

Many trees have been planted along the route of the torch relay, which began in Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park, the model of joint park management between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians.

“In the Aboriginal tradition, the flame is important as fire is regularly lit for regenerating the area,” says park manager Fraser Vickery.

The torch itself, made from from less than a kilogramme of raw material, used half the amount of fuel used in Atlanta 1996 for the same burning time and luminosity.

Bushlands around venues for Olympic track cycling, mountain bike, equestrian, canoe and kayak, softball and shooting events have been restored at a cost of 1.5 million dollars.

Around the International Shooting Centre alone, schools and multicultural groups have planted 150,000 seedlings. This is the biggest ecological restoration project to save the endangered Cumberland Plain Woodland from extinction.

At the Olympic sailing and beach volleyball sites, pollution from stormwater entering the harbour and coastal areas is being reduced. A filtration system has been installed to treat 60 percent of the catchment’s stormwater, including all wastewater from local commercial areas.

Simon Fairweather, who set an Olympic record in archery in Barcelona and Atlanta, says: “We are faced with environmental choices in almost everything we do from building energy-efficient buildings to buying products with less packaging.”

However, all is not green as critics like Greenpeace point out that the greatest failure of Sydney 2000 has been the inability of the New South Wales goverment to remove the half a million tonnes of untreated dioxin-contaminated waste, in Homebush Bay and Rhodes peninsula.

The area is one of the five worst dioxin waste spots in the world and the only place in Australia where it is illegal to fish.

This is a toxic legacy of the multinational chemical companies Union Carbide and Orica. From 1950 to 1970, under laws that allowed it, Union Carbide disposed of the wastes it produced in manufacturing organochlorine pesticides such as DDT and Agent Orange at Homebush, by unloading them in the Bay and surrounding lands.

In 1997, New South Wales pledged to remove all the contamination and use innovative non-incineration technology to treat the dioxins before the 2000 Games, but this has not been done.

Likewise, not a single Olympic venue using air-conditioning meets the environmental guidelines on ozone depleting and greenhouse gases. Catering and other refrigeration needs have been met by a systematic and widespread use of chlorofluorocarbons, hydrochlorofluorocarbons and hydroflurocarbons. This is at a time when the ozone hole is the largest ever.

“Australians are said to be amongst the highest greenhouse polluters in the world,” says the campaign manager for The Wilderness Society, Glen Klatovsky.

“We currently clear more land than any other developed nation, placing us in the top five land-clearing nations on the planet. Even world heritage sites like the Great Barrier Reef is under serious threat from land based pollution and overfishing,” he adds.

Green Games Watch 2000, a coalition of non-government groups acting as community environment watchdog, has been putting pressure on the Australian government to ensure that all development in the city will be subject to the Olympics Environmental Sustainability Guidelines. These were part of Sydney’s winning bid.

Making environment the third pillar aligns the Olympic movement with concerns around the world for the health of the global ecosystem and quality of life. As Peter Cochrane, director of National Parks and Wildlife, Environment Australia, says: “It is not the end, but the beginning of a process.”

Sydney will provide an environmental blueprint for the Olympic Games in future. Green concerns will be a key aspect when Beijing, Paris, Toronto or Osaka bid for the 2008 Olympic Games.

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