Paris models a low-carbon Olympic village

STORY: The 2024 Athletes Village north of Paris is aiming to set the Olympic gold standard for sustainable construction. It's using state of the art low-carbon building technologies, which the public body developing the site hopes could become a model for large scale projects elsewhere.Nicolas Ferrand is in charge of the 125-acre site. “On the athletes’ village site, we're halving carbon emissions per square meter. What we should be aiming to do by 2030, we're already doing at the Olympic Village. And the fact we can do it for this huge Olympic Village, means it can be done everywhere in France. This is what we are proving.” The village will be made up of 31 buildings, hosting 15,000 Olympic and Paralympic athletes on either side of the River Seine in summer 2024. Ferrand describes it as a “unique” test site for sustainable technologies. "Thanks to the games, all the technologies people weren’t completely sure about have been shown to be viable, and deployable everywhere. That's true for flexible buildings, low-carbon concrete, wood, and internal-external air quality. It 's also true for all those technologies which show the construction industry is taking a significant step forward thanks to the Olympics.”After the games have ended, the buildings will be turned into apartments for 6,000 people and offices for 6,000 workers.