PARIS The stands have fallen quiet and the Athletes' Village is emptying. What happens to all the equipment now that the 2024 Paris Olympics are over? The organisers have plans for it.
Over decades, the Games have forged a reputation for monumental waste, with whole stadiums sometimes left to rot once the two-week sporting extravaganza moves on .
But Paris promised to do things differently, using temporary venues to cut construction work but also forcing suppliers to think about a second life for the equipment they supplied, from tennis balls to the sand for beach volleyball.
"Before we ordered anything, we thought about what this thing is going to become afterwards," Paris 2024 sustainability director Georgina Grenon told AFP in an interview last week.
The approach is new for a major global sports event, with her team initially looking for ideas they could copy from Fifa football tournaments or past Olympics before deciding they needed to invent one themselves.
"We also hired consultants and nobody could tell us if this had been done before," explained Grenon, whose team include an expert in the so-called "circular economy".
The first step was drawing up an inventory of everything they needed for the biggest show on earth.
This story is from the August 13, 2024 edition of The Straits Times.
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This story is from the August 13, 2024 edition of The Straits Times.
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