I shall make no apology for the Olympics blogs, when it comes to 2012 and London – you’ll thank me for them!

As I may have mentioned… last week I spent a fantastic week in Vancouver looking at the Winter Olympic Games, from a business point of view. This Olympic Games was branded a greener Olympics and the Canadians did exceptionally well, although some may say it was browner rather than greener due to the lack of snow

As a courier service, we are interested in the transportation aspect of the Olympics. Transportation comes in 2 guises – movement of goods and movement of people. In case you didn’t know, the Olympics are the biggest non war related movement of people worldwide. That’s a lot of people to transport.

Transporting people
With over 350,000 people descending into Vancouver, there can be no margin for error. Vancouver has spent a lot of time and money on making the transportation as green as possible. If we were awarding medals, public transport would get a gold. With a newly built Skytrain system collecting people from the airport and transporting them to downtown Vancouver, and then all subway, streetcars, sea buses and buses were free if your were Olympic ticket holders. Traffic in the area is down 30% as people when given the option of driving or using public transport, chose public transport. An important lesson for the London 2012 Games here.

If you decided to cycle you could park your bicycles for free for the duration of the event with the Bicycle Valet company.

The local seaplane company is carbon neutral and free transport via buses was available up to the mountain events too.

Transporting goods
The local courier companies in Vancouver adapted well to the Olympics, many trained up on foot and bicycle couriers to get around any traffic issues, whilst there is less on the roads, there was more congestion with the Torch Relay and Protests.

So far there are no tales of woe like there were at the Atlanta Games, which is a good thing – it means lessons have been learned.

The greener flavour

As I mentioned at the top, these Games have had a greener flavour. There are many examples of creatively used items to recycle and reuse. The Olympic and Paralympic Village in Whistler reuses captured methane gas from a former landfill site for energy. The main heat source for the communities is waste heat recovered from the wastewater treatment system.

The roof of the Richmond Oval has been marveled over by many, the wood reclaimed from parasites and instead of being destroyed, it is now a much admired soon to be city treasure.

It’s hard not to be impressed by the efforts made by the Canadians to leave a legacy with a smaller carbon footprint than most.

I hope London 2012 gains inspiration and can deliver the same, if not better .

Sarah