Green Design on Display at the Olympics

BY DARRAGH WORLAND | MONDAY, FEBRUARY 15, 2010 10:33 AM ET

Oh, Canada! Sustainable design features prominently at the Vancouver Olympics.

There's no question the Vancouver Winter Olympics will be a showcase of the world's best athletes in winter sports, but some of most cutting-edge green design will also be on display. Fast Company has a great roundup of the best design elements of the Olympics, which include designs by Canada's First Peoples and some really inventive recycled materials.

For starters, the event logo is an abstract image of an Inukshuk, an iconic stone statue of a man, which has been reproduced in Inuit art for centuries. The design beat out more than 1,600 other entries in an open call.

One of the coolest and most ubiquitous "green" features of the Olympics are the medals themselves, designed by architect Omer Arbel and Corrine Hunt, an artist from the Raven Gwa’waina clan on Vancouver Island. Each of the 1,000 medals that will be awarded was cast from silver, gold and bronze reclaimed from discarded computer motherboards, thereby contributing to the reduction of electronic waste.

Scientific American reports that this is the first time recycled materials have been used in the making of Olympic medals, which are usually made from mined mineral deposits.

Some of the structures used in the Olympics also meet sustainable design standards. The Richmond Oval, where all speedskating events will take place, has Silver LEED designation. (The Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design is a sustainable building designation developed by the U.S. Green Building Council.) The structure's huge roof, the size of almost seven Olympic hockey rinks, is made entirely of discarded wood.

Even NBC's broadcast headquarters, the new Vancouver Convention Stadium on the city's waterfront, is set to earn Gold LEED certification and 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 low-floor electric trolleys donated by Bombardier and shipped in from Brussels. The trolleys have already become a standard for green mass-transit, reports Fast Company. Since their introduction three years ago, over 450 have been installed across Europe, and Toronto has ordered 204 models of a similar design.

Be sure to check out Fast Company's slideshow featuring photos of these designs and more.

Photo courtesy of VANOC.