!["[We can] minimize the environmental impact of event-triggered infrastructure projects."](https://www.thecooldown.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Paris-Olympicsimage.jpg)
The Olympic Games are certainly an exciting time for whichever city gets to host them — but they have also historically come with an array of environmental drawbacks. This summer's 2024 Paris Olympics have sought to buck that trend, Business Insider reported.
A 2021 study published in the scientific journal Nature Sustainability evaluated the environmental impact of the 16 editions of the Summer and Winter Olympic Games between 1992 and 2020 and found that "No Olympics … score in the top category" of sustainability.
The Rio de Janeiro Games, for example, produced more than 18,700 tons of waste, used 29,500 gigawatts of electricity from mainly non-renewable sources, and resulted in over 3.9 million tons of planet-overheating air pollution.
"Three actions should make Olympic hosting more sustainable: first, greatly reducing the size of the event; second, rotating the Olympics among the same cities; third, enforcing independent sustainability standards," the study concluded.
The 2024 Paris Olympics has taken none of those actions, but it has still done several things to limit its environmental harm. For one, this Olympics has managed to repurpose existing venues instead of building new ones from scratch (with only one exception, in the form of the Aquatics Centre).
In previous Olympics, newly constructed competition facilities that end up abandoned and disused are something of a hallmark of the Games — an obviously wasteful practice.
The 2024 Paris Olympics has also seen Orange, the official telecommunications provider of the Games, set a goal of limiting its planet-overheating air pollution to about 11,000 tons of carbon dioxide. To accomplish this, Orange relied on local suppliers for much of its 5G equipment and shipped large items by sea instead of by air.
"By designing infrastructure that can be repurposed for other community uses postevent, and implementing green technologies and sustainable practices … [we can] minimize the environmental impact of event-triggered infrastructure projects," Kelvin Chaffer, the CEO of Lifecycle Software, a company that provides support systems for network operators, told Business Insider.
It will take more time to assess how successful the Paris Games were in these goals, but the sheer fact of prioritizing sustainability could help to set an example for future Olympics and other events for years to come.
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