Chicago 2016 touts green spaces, water access, as hallmarks of the bid

If Bob Accarino has his way, and Chicago wins the 2016 Olympic bid, the Olympic Stadium seats will be recycled into 80,000 wheelchairs when the games are over. Accarino is the chief environmental sustainability consultant for Chicago 2016, the city's bid organizing committee, and he has made it his job to scout out innovative programs to make Chicago's bid more eco-friendly.

As the decision nears, Chicago 2016 has been highlighting the green and blue aspects of the city’s bid—from tree-planting programs to public service programs to bring clean water to the third world.

Accarino and the Chicago 2016 committee presented these plans and fleshed out the connections between sports and the environment at the Summit on Sport and Sustainability they hosted from Sept. 10-11 at the Hilton.

The Summit brought together environmental experts, sustainable development companies and the organizers of major sporting events like the Boston Marathon and the Super Bowl to discuss ways to reduce their environmental impact.

“We live in a city that has a strong history of being sensitive to the environment,” Pat Ryan, chairman of Chicago 2016, said at the Summit’s opening ceremony, citing the city’s sprawling public parklands and LED certified buildings. “We want the Games and the seven years leading up to the Games to leave a sustainable legacy for our environment for generations to come.”

All four candidate cities are proposing environmentally-conscious initiatives. Madrid, for example, has plans to expand parklands and bike-lanes by thousands of kilometers, Tokyo will “recycle” the venues it used to host the 1964 Games.

But according to Accarino, several features of Chicago’s plan distinguish it from the “green” competition. “We built upon the foundations the city already has… and came up with independent programs that can be initiated before, during, and after the Games.”

Most apparent about the bid’s commitment to environmental sustainability is how it wants to go beyond the color “green,” in name and in practice.

The bid touts itself as the “Blue-Green Games,” Accarino said, and makes clean water access a focal point. Because “Chicago is right on Lake Michigan, we have a responsibility not to cause any harm to local drinking water resources. Even though we have a lot of water, we should be looking at water as a precious resource.”

“The Olympic Games provides one of the largest marketing platforms in the world,” he added, and this compels the city’s bid to use the events to address world poverty issues.

Still, some critics of the bid have suggested that Chicago 2016’s proposals amount to little more than “green-washing,” and that the plans are too vague to be successful. But Accarino says the ambiguity over exactly what forms of renewable energy the bid would implement is an asset.

“One of the real technology challenges we’ve had in terms of transportation is that we don’t know what’s going to be around in 2016,” he explained. “We know we want to use [fuel-efficient cars,] but if we say we’re going to have all hydrogen vehicles, and they weren’t marketable by 2016, then that would be a real problem for us. We have to be somewhat general—we’re not sure if there will be electric vehicles or carbon vehicles or hybrids.”

One project Accarino supports that is not part of the Olympic bid, though it shares part of the bid’s name, is the Urban Lab “Eco Boulevard.” Urban Lab, a local urban design firm, used the increasing scarcity of clean water as the departure point for the ambitious project, which would convert a series of city streets into small parks filled with micro-organisms that clean stormwater and run-off. Urban Land designers are discussing these plans with city government.

“We realize that the Games here in Chicago would be a great catalyst for really innovative projects like that,” Accarino said. “Think about the CTA stops many people would take to go to the stadium, [55th St. and Garfield Blvd.] That could become a Blue-Green Blvd.”