“It’s the great thing about the sports industry: everyone wants to win, including on sustainability,” remarked Becky Dale, Vice President of Sustainability for Los Angeles 2028. “Every time you host, you want to up the ante.”
Heading into 2028, the reigning champion is clear: Total CO2 equivalent emissions at last summer’s Paris Olympics were 1.59 million tons, less than half of the average emissions at the London 2012 and Rio de Janeiro 2016 Games. That progress makes Paris the gold standard of sustainability, but in the Olympic spirit of faster, higher, stronger (and greener?), LA 2028 is determined to surpass it. The 2028 Games’s Impact and Sustainability Plan is dedicated to reducing waste and making sure that much of the material used is distributed back into the community — and that’s just for starters.
So what exactly will be done? Dale and Nurit Katz, UCLA’s Chief Sustainability Officer, gave a presentation on plans to green the next Games at the Energy Innovation Conference at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management earlier this year. Then in August, LA 2028 released its Impact and Sustainability Plan, a structured document laying out how organizers plan to maximize the Olympics’s sustainability potential. Here are the main ideas.
A mural reveals the new LA28 logo, with the “A” designed by Orlando Pride player Alex Morgan, at the Delano Recreation Center in Van Nuys, California. The 2028 Summer Olympics are scheduled to take place from July 21, 2028 to August 6, 2028. (Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images)
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No new venues. This is the big one, and it sets LA apart. The last time an Olympics took place without any kind of new construction whatsoever was in post-war London in 1948. In this way LA may be the ideal city to host the Olympics, because the city was “built for large, live-scale events, from the Grammys and the Academy Awards to the FIFA World Cup and the Super Bowl,” the sustainability plan notes. “With the region’s abundance of existing, world-class stadiums and arenas ready to host the Games today, athletes at the 2028 Games will have access to exceptional fields of play and fans will enjoy unbeatable spectating.”
Bonus: No new venues also means drastically reduced carbon emissions from the get-go. Existing infrastructure also means that every competition venue is within a 35-mile radius of downtown LA, and most of them won’t even take that long to get to from the Athletes’ Village on the UCLA campus.
There is one caveat: Though they weren’t built expressly for the Games, there has been a fair amount of new construction going up in Los Angeles, and the Games is taking advantage, though not counting it (and the emissions produced) in its column. Case in point: The $2 billion Intuit Dome in Inglewood, home to the LA Clippers, opened last year. In 2028, it will host the Olympic and Paralympic basketball events.
Reusing gets radicalized. Translation: Almost all materials used for the Games will get a “second life” somewhere. The target is to have 90 percent of materials used for temporary infrastructure reused or recycled, Dale said. Los Angeles will rely on a combination of rentals, buybacks, and donations of materials to ensure reuse of “as much material as possible,” she promised.
Paris also organized post-Games flea markets where fans could scoop up hard-to-come-by swag like the distinctive striped blue and aqua volunteer’s shirts, as well as excess sports equipment and other Games memorabilia.
Go to the grid. The sustainability plan promises that electricity used to power venues will be fully renewable. This one may seem obvious, but a lot of events rely on energy produced by generators, Dale said. Using the grid means being able to buy renewable energy, thus reducing the Games’s carbon footprint even further.
Kill the cars. On the transportation side, organizers are promoting what they call “enhanced public transit” that will ferry fans from one venue to another. “Our big challenge is how do we make public transportation the most attractive option for people coming to the Games?” said Dale. Expect these vehicles to be buses, which doesn’t sound glamorous but will at least prevent you from having to look for a parking space. “Ultimately people are creatures of free will,” Dale added, “but there are ways to create incentives and smooth the path so we can make it a more desirable option.”
Eliminate single-use containers. Gone will be days when big gulp cups overflow in trash cans around venues. In Paris, beverages at venues cost an extra euro or two, but the hard plastic cups could be returned for a refund at special collection points nearby.
Cost of reductions: An Olympics game-changer?
So what is all this Olympics greening likely to cost, and will it be more expensive than doing it the easy way? “There’s very much a myth that going green or being sustainable always has to cost more,” said Katz. Sometimes, though, savings and sustainability do go hand in hand. “Some of our initiatives, especially around energy efficiency or around reducing waste really have operational savings,” she added.
What will be required is for everyone — athletes, officials, and spectators heading to the Games — to do their parts to reduce emissions during the Olympics, whether it’s toting a reusable water bottle to training or taking a bus to see rather than driving to see flag football make its Olympic debut.
“I think it can sometimes be easy, especially in moments like right now on sustainability to kind of throw up your hands a little bit and say, ‘We need systemic change, individual action is not enough.’ We do need systemic change but we also need individual action,” Dale said. “It’s both.”