London pushes sustainability and ecology to the forefront

The London Olympics will push ecology and sustainability to the forefront of their waste management objectives this summer, with 100,000 contractors being employed to deal with catering and cleaning the waste created by the event.

David Stubbs, Locog's head of sustainability, recently talked to the Guardian about how the company is creating an environmentally sustainable legacy in London this summer, with a task of mammoth proportions on the hands of the waste management company.

He said: "We seem to be dealing in the tens of thousands for all sorts of things here: the scale of this operation is enormous." Enormous is certainly the operative word of the sentence, Locog will be handling 10,500 athletes, double that number of media, a workforce of 200,000 and 11 million ticket holders. On food alone, this equates to 14 million meals.

One of the major legacies that Locog wanted to leave behind was to shun landfills. The trick to this is management, and Mr Stubbs seems to have everything under control. The key to the Olympic disposal and recycling lies in the 4,000 or so colour-coded bins that dot the park – and, later in the Barking waste-sorting site where it will all be processed, the Guardian reported.

Mr Stubbs said:"The bins are very striking and are hard to miss.

"We're hoping that people will just take half a second to read the labels on them and realise that the orange mark on their cup or plate actually represents the orange of the compostable stream and that goes in there with the food waste and then the bottles and any dry paper go in the recycling bin."

Once full, the bins are taken to a materials recovery facility in Barking, which is being used exclusively by the Games. There is also the issue of human waste, where a variety of technologies old and new have been deployed to save water and honour London 2012's long-term commitment to reduce the amount of potable water consumed.

Posted by Claire Manning