Olympic village that housed athletes is the most visible example of the 2006 organizing committee’s commitment to sustainability

Jeff Lee
Sun

TURIN – On one side of a Turin railway yard is the Lingotto Fiere, the massive former Fiat automobile factory, a testament to everything industrial in this northern Italian city.

For nearly 70 years Europe’s biggest mass-production factory pumped out millions of pollution-producing cars and trucks, and in its own right became a significant polluter.

On the other side of the tracks is an equally potent symbol of the industriousness of Italy’s architects and planners, but of a different generation.

The 39 buildings that make up the new Olympic village signify a small but important change in the city’s stature as it tries to remake itself away from its heavy-industry image.

The village is the centrepiece of a complex environmental statement by the Turin 2006 Winter Games organizing committee.

The drinking and bathing water in each of the apartments is heated by roof-top solar panels. Wide-area radiant floor heating is used instead of inefficient wall radiators, and the heat comes from a new co-generation and district heating plant at Moncalieri that now heats part of the southern neighbourhoods of Turin. The walls are insulated with recycled cellulose fibre.

Each of the buildings has also been oriented to take best advantage of the sun as it rises and sets in the south, with deep double-pane windows to trap heat. The roofs all have wide flanges for collecting water that is then funnelled into underground cisterns for recycling on to area gardens.

Paolo Revellino sees the manifestation of a relatively new Olympic ideal, the concept that environmental stewardship should be as important in the Olympics as are two other concepts, sport and culture.

Revellino, the head of sustainability assessment for the Turin Olympic Organizing Committee, and his colleague Ugo Pretato, head of environmental programs, are the main architects of Toroc’s self-described attempt to be “the greenest Games ever.”

As he stood on the rooftop of one of the village’s buildings looking at the Lingotto, Revellino explained why Toroc undertook such a lofty goal.

“I don’t think you can consider the Olympics to be just about sport any more. It has the ability to influence the way people think and to change attitudes. Turin has the opportunity to do that also in how we take care of the environment. This is an industrial city, but it is changing.”

The Olympic village is the most visible example of Toroc’s sustainability commitments. It is built on the site of another industrial legacy, the old Mercati Generali wholesale grocers market, which operated from 1934 until the early 1990s before it was moved out of the city because of complaints of pollution and noise from residents.

In 2004 most of the abandoned warehouses were torn down, but the central building was kept and renovated into a series of shops and services.

Marco Operto, the construction manager for Agencia Turin 2006, the government arm that built the village, said it represents the best that Italy has to offer for changing public attitudes.

“This is something very new for Italians,” he said. “We haven’t always been so careful about conserving energy or water.”

It has only been in the last decade that the International Olympic Committee has realized its power to change public views around the environment. In 1994, when the Lillehammer Winter Games in Norway earned high marks for being compact and environmentally friendly, the Olympic movement began to recognize it could influence the world on environmental matters.

Two years later the IOC amended its charter to include environmental stewardship, and it has used moral suasion and political clout ever since to encourage Games organizers to plan events that meet or exceed environmental standards.

For organizing committees that have to manage tight budgets, these are not inconsequential costs. Operto figures the environmental initiatives drove the $198 million Cdn project up by about five to seven per cent, but the savings will be realized within 10 years.

Toroc’s environmental statement is much broader than just the Olympic village. The committee based its environmental management program on a set of stringent principles that included minimizing the footprint of the Games, recycling waste material, monitoring and mitigating the impact of construction and operation of the facilities and using eco-efficient transportation. It also encouraged local hotels and boarding facilities to subscribe to the European Union’s Ecolabel program which sets environmental standards for accommodation.

Toroc also sought certification under both the European Union’s Eco-Management and Audit Scheme (EMAS) and ISO 14001, two voluntary programs designed around standardizing environmental management systems. Failing to comply with the certification doesn’t earn participants a fine, but it is a public embarrassment to be de-listed or criticized, Revellino said.

Toroc put together a number of high-value environmental projects to demonstrate its management principles, including the Olympic Village, three co-generation plants — two of which are at mountain venues –and a biathlon venue building that generates its own electricity with photovoltaic solar panels.

Ever since the Sydney 2000 Summer Games organizers have tried to make the events “carbon-neutral”, offsetting the greenhouse gases produced by the Games through efforts such as planting trees.

But Turin was the first Games to attempt to meet the Kyoto Protocol on greenhouse gases.

“Our goal was to offset the greenhouse gases generated by the Olympic Games,” Pretato said. “We want to be able to say we recovered the greenhouse gases between our Games and the next one in Vancouver,”

Carbon dioxide is blamed for causing global warming, and the Kyoto Protocol, which comes up for renewal in 2012, has been signed by a number of countries, including Canada, as an action plan for reducing greenhouse gases.

Pretato and his colleagues calculated that more than 121,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide would be generated by the Games, primarily from transportation and the operation of the events. It didn’t include the amount that the spectators themselves would produce.

The $7-million Cdn greenhouse gas initiative, called Project Hector (which stands for Heritage Climate Turin), is funded by the Piedmont Region and involves carbon credits generated from three low-energy district heating and two co-generation projects. The town council in Pinerolo, site of the curling venue, is also undertaking energy-saving programs that will generate carbon credits.

“I think we are expecting about 250,000 tonnes of carbon credits from these projects,” Pretato said. “Over four years we will generate more credits than were necessary for the entire Games.”

Toroc also became the first organization in Italy, and one of the first in Europe, to implement a “strategic environmental assessment.” The SEA program was mandated by Italian law and required Toroc and Agencia Turin 2006 to subject every project to set of environmental principles.

Revellino said one example of that was the snow-making facilities Toroc had to install at mountain venues. After reviewing the plans, Toroc cut the number of temporary reservoirs needed by a third.

Toroc also used methane-powered buses where possible, and electric golf carts in the village itself.

But not every program has met with success. Recycling in Italy is not widely practised and unlike the Lower Mainland, there is no curbside program. Inhabitants can take their cans, bottles and papers to communal depots, often large containers located on street boulevards. Italy also doesn’t have a container deposit system. Instead, manufacturers pay an up-front fee that is then supposed to be filtered down to municipalities which mount recycling programs.

Toroc tried to encourage a separate-at-source recycling program with its staff and at the media centres.

It put out different-coloured cardboard bins for bottles, papers, organics and plastics. In the media centres, however, they didn’t put all the containers together to offer a choice. As a result, people threw their garbage into the nearest container regardless of content.

However, Revellino said Toroc worked with suppliers to cut down the potential for waste; Coca-Cola, the corporate beverage sponsor, agreed to supply drinks only in plastic bottles that could be recycled, and McDonald’s, another sponsor, used environmentally-friendly packaging.

Food suppliers also used utensils made from corn starch instead of plastic. The only problem with that was that the corn starch, which is compostable, also breaks down under heat. Revellino said that presented problems for soup-eaters, and Toroc had to change to plastic spoons.

Turin‘s efforts have also earned high marks from the 2010 Vancouver Olympic Organizing Committee (Vanoc).

“They definitely raised the bar in environmental management and certification,” said Linda Cody, Vanoc’s vice-president of sustainability.

Cody said Vanoc is still working on its environmental management plan but has also pledged to be “carbon neutral.” Vanoc hasn’t finished a greenhouse gas audit but Cody thinks it will be less than Turin’s 121,000 tonnes because B.C. has a different energy structure.

Most of the province’s power-generation is hydro-electric. The city also uses a high proportion of electric buses and the SkyTrain and new Canada Line are also carbon-free.

BC Transit also has a proposal to have 20 hydrogen-powered buses in operation in Whistler. Vanoc will supply bus transportation between Vancouver and Whistler, reducing the amount of vehicles on the Sea-to-Sky Highway, Cody said.

Vanoc is also working on obtaining environmental certification under ISO 14001, and has also pledged to build most of its venues to a minimum LEEDS silver standard, she said. (LEEDS is a North American environmental equivalent to EMAS.)

Cody said every Olympics is different, even if the end goal in environmental sustainability is the same.

“There is no cookie-cutter plan for how you do this,” she said. “But I think we will be equally diligent in what we do.”

She said Vanoc’s map for its environmental programs will likely be ready by the end of the year.

© The Vancouver Sun 2006

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 22nd, 2006 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Other News Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.