This is a highlight from the Building Priorities Briefing.

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Transcript

Denis Du Bois:
Earlier in the program I asked if there's any way to completely mitigate the environmental impact of an event of this magnitude. But what if the Olympic Committee -- and its sponsors -- were faced with the challenge to either make the games environmentally benign, or stop holding them altogether?

To explore that idea with us, I've invited Martin Westerman, author of "The Business Environmental Handbook" and other works on environmental subjects. He's a lecturer on sustainable business, for the University of Washington Business School, and the Bainbridge Graduate Institute. He's President of Green Business Advisors, and a columnist on green living.

Martin, is it possible to neutralize the environmental impact of the Olympics?

Martin Westerman:
We're, unfortunately, in a space where we're all about cleaning up after ourselves rather than not making a mess. The fact is that we've already made the mess. A lot of what we do is devoted to learning as we go and finding out that we've already made a mistake. And you know, hindsight is 20/20, but when we're creating the mess, often we're not aware of what we're doing until we refine our research.

So, I think that given those circumstances, the Vancouver Olympic Committee, VANOC, is doing the absolute best it can to think ahead and balance that thinking ahead with cleaning up after itself. And within the context of environmental matters being a very low priority compared to everything else on its plate.

What it should be, and what Paul Lingl of the David Suzuki Foundation and a number of other people say, is it should be build in so that nobody has got any choice about the matter, it's just built in. It's just the way we do business.

And their sustainability person, says pretty much the same thing. She's trying to build it into their operations, rather than making it an overhead item. Which, of course, is going to be shunted off to the side, because making a profit on this thing, and selling the tickets on it, and getting the security for the venue, and making sure the transportation is lined up. Making sure their public relations are not impacted by the drug problems in Vancouver and the homeless problems in Vancouver. Those are all bigger priorities than just making sure we don't generate too much carbon.

Also, the economics of it say there is really...carbon is an externality that is not monetized. When you think about it, everything we value is not monetized. We don't value -- we don't monetize community. We don't monetize family. We don't monetize education. We don't monetize faith. We don't monetize health...

Denis:
What would you do if it were your job to completely minimize the environmental impact of an event like the Olympics?

Martin:
I would put it in the same place every year.

And a lot of people have made that suggestion, and it's a logical thing to do. But humans don't really operate on logic, they operate a lot more on emotion.

Logically, you put them in one venue. Two thirds of the carbon generated for the Olympics is in travel, air travel between all the points around the world and the Olympic venues.

If you put the Olympics in one place, then a third of that impact would be taken care of every year. You wouldn't generate new carbon footprint, new greenhouse gasses, building new venues every year in different place in the world, and having to re-sort how everybody was going to fly out there.

Because people are flying from more collections of countries in Europe to Vancouver, for example, than they would be from collections of countries to Athens, say, for the Summer Games and to the Italian Alps for the Winter Games.

There are so many countries and so many Olympic teams in proximity to those two particular locations. So if the IOC -- the International Olympic Committee -- designated single venues for Summer and Winter Games in country-population centers. And by that, I mean areas where lots of countries surround the venues rather than venues where very few countries surround the venues -- say Peking, or Beijing, or Vancouver -- then immediately we would reduce the air flight impact of getting to the games.

The problem is we don't operate logically, What we operate on is how exciting it is and how much revenue each new venue can generate and how much reputation it can build by getting the Olympics in their home city.

I was talking with somebody close to the US Olympic Committee who said, "You know, even though these cities run the risk of bankrupting themselves and their countries just to put this thing together. Even though they're going to get an onslaught of additional people and have to find additional lodging and have to find better transportation and so on, they line up out the door to bid for an Olympic games because the prestige of it is so huge."

It's really the human nature aspect that's driving this, not logic.

Denis:
What is the reputation of British Columbia in terms of sustainability?

Martin:
It's a mixed bag, I think, like other developed countries. And I'd like to better informed about this than I am, but my observations of it are that Vancouver is one of the leading environmental cities in the world. They've got a terrific public transportation system. They're moving towards being a carbon-neutral city like Seattle is, and that's reflected in what they're doing with the Olympics.

The province itself, however, makes money on logging, they make money on farming. They're not doing much organic farming, and they tend to be rapacious around their logging. So when it comes down to, again, sustainability, jobs versus environment is how they look at it. So the priority of the environment is low and the priority of making the revenue is high.

Vancouver, actually, and Victoria, and northwestern Washington cities, have been contending for quite a while about sewage that Victoria flushes into the Puget Sound and Strait of Juan de Fuca. Anyway, they've been contending about that for quite a while, and Victoria is unwilling to pay for tertiary treatment. They're even, I think, unwilling to pay for secondary treatment on that sewage.

And then, also, when the protesters were showing up to block the expansion of the Sea to Sky Highway for the Olympics. That's the one that runs from Vancouver up to Whistler. The gendarmerie arrested everybody and threw them in jail without trial or without attorneys' representation, by using an injunction form of the law.

And so they tend to be very tough on people who protest for the environment. People who want the province to mitigate damage and then report on the damage are hitting stone walls all the time because the province is really unwilling to mitigate and they're unwilling to report -- except in the case of the Olympics, which is a showcase event.

So, since they're in the world-wide public eye, they've got to show some kind of transparency. But generally, they're less willing provincially to be transparent and to be proactive and helpful.

Denis:
So if you were advising the IOC or any future Olympic host city, like London Sochi, what strategies would you recommend?

Martin:
Number one, build sustainability into the entire operation, so that there isn't any question. "We just operate this way." And in order to do that, you have got to do a lot of homework on the business case, or the business cases, for say, locally grown and organic food supply, composting all the waste, doing a carbon footprint for scopes one, two, and three. That is your direct activities, your indirectly related activities, and then the activities that are peripheral but related to your initiative. So for the entire seven years to know beforehand that you are going to build this much, and you are going to put this much concrete on the ground. You are going to dig this much earth out and so on.

And the architecture firm Mithun, here in Seattle, has done a lot of work on the carbon footprint, the life cycle carbon footprint of construction. And there are other people who are working on that, too.

So everybody mitigates everything, or they avoid degeneration in the first place from the get-go. We don't look it all over and after seven years we say, "OK. Let's buy enough carbon offsets to take care of this."

So we build sustainability into the operation from the beginning, because we already know what the operation looks like. We have done it in Vancouver, and Calgary, and Athens, and Beijing, and everywhere already. So we know what it looks like. So why does each committee in each city have to start fresh?

The second thing is we market the heck out of it. We just say, "Hey," to the populous. And this is the catalyst to change the building codes so that, everything was built from when the city gets its bid approved onward, the building codes change, so everything built there, whether it is for the Olympics or not, gets built to the different standard.

And we use this as a catalyst, as Vancouver did, to improve the transportation infrastructure so that we have got a legacy afterward of improved transportation infrastructure and reduced carbon footprint infrastructure.

And then we change the food supply system as part of that sustainability piece. Instead of an average 1,500 miles that the food travels to get to the plate of the person in the city, we start sourcing locally and regionally. We use those building codes again to help local farmers by keeping their taxes low so that they can stay on the land and produce for the cities. So we make the city healthier not only while we do the Olympics, but the legacy afterward is a healthier city.