Issue 19, 2013 - Balliol College - University of Oxford

features
Sustainability at
the Olympic Park
By Anne Askwith
Among the Olympic Development Authority’s many aspirations for
the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympics Games was that they
should be the most sustainable Games ever. And as sustainability
manager for one of the infrastructure teams involved in the creation
of the Olympic Park, where the Games took place, it fell to Dr Dorte
Rich Jørgensen (1989) to try to achieve that.
The Olympic Park is a 2.5 square km
site featuring a number of waterways
and links to surrounding areas via
highway, cycleway and rail networks.
The bridges and highways provide the
backbone to the Park’s infrastructure.
For the purposes of construction
logistics, it was split into two parks,
Philip Wade Photography
North and South. Dorte’s employer,
Atkins, a design, engineering, and
project management consultancy,
was responsible for the infrastructure
for the North Park, in which the
Basketball Arena, the Velodrome and
the Olympic Village (among other
Games venues) were located.
The structures, bridges and
highways (SBH) for the North
Park included retaining walls,
highways, secondary roads, one
land bridge, one highway bridge,
six existing bridges, and two
underpasses. Dorte’s responsibility
was to ensure that the sustainability
objectives specified by the ODA
were embedded in the design and
construction of all the infrastructure
features, which included SBH,
parkland and public realm, and
utilities. These objectives related to
issues such as the use of recycled
materials, increasing biodiversity,
and the reduction of energy and
carbon consumption.
Embedded sustainability
As work started in 2007, the
challenge facing Dorte was immense,
especially, she says, ‘the huge size
of it, with a breadth of stakeholders
and a very definite deadline, doing
something that had not been done
before in a heavy media and public
spotlight’. Working with teams across
the Park, she and her team set out
to meet their objectives with many
initiatives, including:
• using materials reclaimed from
the site for gabion baskets
to make walls; substituting
pulverised fly ash for cement;
• replacing primary aggregates
with secondary aggregates (e.g.
glass sand and china clay stent);
• including recycled materials in
flexible and rigid pavements;
• using waste plastic for temporary
kerbs, which were used for the
temporary roads used only
during the Olympic Games;
• reusing existing structures,
such as bridges;
• designing for Legacy, when
the Park will be transformed
into a visitor destination and
community park, where feasible;
• choosing drainage pipes that used
recycled aggregates as bedding
material (e.g. concrete or clay);
• reducing pavement thickness for
the temporary roads, which had
a four-year design life as opposed
to the 40-year design life of the
permanent roads;
• ensuring that as much of the
materials as possible for the
infrastructure design could be
delivered by rail.
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