WHEN Paris last hosted the Summer Olympics a century ago, organizers were so keen to bring athletes under one roof that they built the first-ever Olympic Village. Spartan and made up of furnished wood huts, it was torn down shortly after. They are approaching it differently this time. As part of their effort to make Paris 2024 the most responsible and sustainable games in history, they’re building something that will last. This village was conceived as a neighborhood where people will actually live afterwards, said Georgina Grenon, the Paris 2024 director of sustainability. Paris 2024 is only renting it for a few months. After the games, the 50-hectare site with 82 buildings next to the River Seine in the popular district of Seine-Saint-Denis will become a eco-friendly neighborhood with office space for 6,000 workers and apartments for 6,000 residents — the first ones moving in as soon as 2025. Like the Olympics — which organizers say will run 100% on renewable energy — everything built for the village was done with sustainability in mind. To minimize the amount of construction, organizers temporarily or permanently retrofitted several existing structures on the site, including an old electric factory that’s been turned into a resident center. They also rented existing movie studios in the area to be used as training facilities for athletes instead of building new ones. The buildings that were erected were built with wood and recycled materials, employing processes that, according to Grenon, reduced the project’s carbon footprint by 30% per square meter — more than French ecological regulations require. A third of all the rooftops are equipped with solar panels, while another third have gardens meant to bring down the temperature inside, Grenon said. Long, straight openings leading to the Seine were left in between the buildings to form wind tunnels carrying the fresh air near the river as far inland as possible. But the structures themselves aren’t the only thing that will be recycled. The village will house about 3,000 apartments containing a total of 14,250 beds made with recyclable materials similar to the ones used in Tokyo. The mattresses were manufactured with reused materials and their firmness can be adjusted by flipping them over. Stools were made with cardboard meaning they can be easily recycled after the Olympics. Across the village, organizers are running a handful of experiments to see if new green technologies and construction methods are viable in the real world. One sidewalk has been made with seashells. In theory, those shells are supposed to absorb rain. On hot days, the stored water should evaporate and help cool passers-by. Five giant, UFO-like outdoor air filters are designed like vacuums to suck in the polluted air and filter out dangerous particles. The device can clean “95% of the air of the particulate matter — all sizes,” its creator, Jerome Giacomoni, was quoted by CNN as saying. While some buildings in the Olympic Village are equipped with traditional air conditioning on the ground floor because they will be converted into shops after the Olympics, the athlete apartments will use geothermal cooling — much like the one that has helped the Louvre Museum cope with the sweltering heat that broke records last year — to keep temperatures in check. This system takes water cooled to 4 degrees Celsius from wells as deep as 70 meters underground at a nearby geothermal plant and transports them to pipes under the floors of each apartment. That cold water should be able to cool the building by 6 to 10 degrees Celsius compared to the temperature outside, according to Laurent Michaud, the Paris 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Village director. While the system will be controlled at the building level, each apartment has a thermostat that allows them to lower or raise the temperature by 2 degrees Celsius in each unit. The system will also heat apartments in the winter. For delegations concerned about the system’s efficacy during a heat wave, the village will offer them the option to rent individual air conditioning units. (SD-Agencies) | 