As a young boy mad about sports, growing up I viewed the Olympic and Paralympic Games as the pinnacle of the sporting world. Athletes coming together from 190+ nations just once every 4 years to see who was best. There was nothing like it. The Games were the highlight of every summer whenever they happened.

With time, my adoration for the Games has quelled. We are far more aware now of the negative impacts that hosting and delivering the Olympic Games has had on local communities. Or the increasing awareness of the vast sums of money spent for each set of games, when this money could arguably go into funding public services or welfare programmes.

Yet for each host city, the immediate costs are not always so huge. For example for Paris 2024, 96% of all the costs are covered by the private sector. Great, you might say, that public budgets are not too hollowed out for a sporting event that citizens have no say on hosting. 

But when 96% of all the finance comes from the private sector, what independence does that give to the host city to decide on how the games are run? 

For example, the city of Paris ambitiously declared that the entire Games were going to be “zero single-use plastic.” But how much competency does the city have over this claim? Especially when one of the official partners for the Games, Coca-Cola, has obtained exclusivity for the distribution and sale of drinks during the Games. Despite regularly topping the table for being the world’s biggest plastic polluter, the multinational giant did agree to work towards achieving this zero single-use plastic goal through three different solutions: recycled plastic bottles (rPET), bulk sales with soda fountains and glass bottles for reuse.

At the football match I attended at the Parc des Princes in Paris, all drinks were only sold in reusable cups with a 2 euro deposit. Either non-alcoholic ones in Paris Olympic branded cups, or soft drinks (all only within the Coca-Cola company) in specific Coke branded cups. This is a problem unfortunately preventing an efficient reuse system. Where cups are specifically branded for the event, it leads to much lower return rates, as spectators take their cups home as mementos. One of the key learnings we are seeing from our own work on developing reuse systems across European cities is that un- or low-branded reusable packaging best delivers results within large-scale open events such as these.

There were also a number of free water dispensers dotted around the stadium for people to refill their own bottles and cups. From my short experience, in general the system seemed to be working fine, although single-use packaging was still being used for food being served and commonplace at the sites around the stadium.

Yet unfortunately there has been much reporting and people witnessing the fact that many of the drinks sold in reusable cups are actually being poured from single-use plastic bottles. Coca-Cola has since admitted that over half of the 18 million beverages are going to be distributed in single-use plastic bottles during the games. This doesn’t just go against a green code of ethics, it’s actually illegal. The 2020 anti-waste law (AGEC) in France prohibits the free distribution of plastic bottles in public venues.

As our colleague Marine Bonavita, Project Manager at Zero Waste France, which is one of Zero Waste Europe’s members, said about the Olympics, “major events like these should serve as an opportunity to demonstrate that it is possible to organise gatherings of this scale without relying on plastic or single-use products. Attracting millions of visitors, these events are the perfect time to implement large-scale reuse systems and raise awareness among as many people as possible. Single-use items should no longer have a place in these international events.”

The work the City of Paris has done on its zero single-use plastic strategy before and up to the Games is commendable, with several initiatives specific to the Games part of the city’s broader zero single-use plastic strategy. We were fortunate enough, at a recent event we organised for ZWE members and city officials on waste prevention strategies in cities,to have a presentation from Paris City officials on their innovative monitoring framework for measuring the success of this strategy.

So what does this all mean for those of us working for a waste-free world? Two things can both be true at the same time:

Firstly, the City of Paris should be applauded for its ambition and attempts to reduce single-use plastic during such a global event. It must be recognised that to attempt to bring reuse into the biggest sporting event in the world is a huge task, one which is not likely to be done without issue on the first go. 

At the same time, we must continue to get multinationals such as Coca-Cola to recognise the idiocracy of its current business model, and either through legislation or stakeholder influence, to get them to switch to models globally which utilise reusable packaging instead. A 10 percent increase in reusable beverage packaging globally by 2030 from Coca-Cola alone can eliminate more than one trillion single-use plastic bottles and cups.

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• Source: https://zerowasteeurope.eu/2024/08/has-hope-for-reuse-at-the-olympics-paralympics-gone-up-in-flames/