When we heal the earth, we heal ourselves. ~David Orr

The world has come together in Vancouver. And these Olympics are the greenest in history!

For example, the Olympic and Paralympic Village will reuse captured methane gas from a former landfill for energy and the primary heat source for the community will be waste heat recovered from the municipal wastewater treatment system.

The Richmond Oval, where all speed skating events will take place, has a huge ceiling – the size of almost seven Olympic hockey rinks! It is made with a million board feet of pine beetle-infested wood that otherwise would have gone to waste. Wood cleared from the six-acre site before construction began was used to make benches in the team dressing rooms. Even the rainwater running off the roof is collected in a pond for irrigation and for flushing the facility’s toilets!

NBC’s broadcast headquarters has a six-acre “living roof.” The roof features an enormous garden with 400,000 individual indigenous plants to help regulate the building’s temperature.

And of course how green could the Olympics be without sustainable transportation? The athletes will be traveling between venues and around the Olympic village via cutting-edge electric trolleys. Since their introduction three years ago, over 450 of them have been installed across Europe, and Toronto has ordered 204 models of a similar design.

Vancouver has raised the bar.

Remember, it is easy being green!
By Jennifer Jesperson