Carbon Offsets and Recycling Bins a Green Olympics Do Not Make
The pressure to green-up the Olympics builds with each games, forcing the host cities to get creative. Like using beetle-chewed wood for your skating center's roof With an unexpected lack of snow making skiers' lives miserable at this year's Olympics, Vancouver is smartly following the trend of going greener than the Olympics before it. Carbon offsets and recycling bins are as old school as a 720 on the snowboard half pipe, so the Canucks had to get a bit more creative to ensure the 2014 games in Russia take place in a world where snow still falls over Sochi in February. The Richmond Olympic Oval is to Vancouver as the Bird's Nest was to Beijing (though on a scale more befitting of Vancouver than Beijing). The 8,000-seat, 512,000-square-foot building uses a novel styrofoam insulation beneath the ice to obtain the necessary ice temp, thickness, flatness and hardness for a variety of...