Vancouver 2010 mascots Miga, left, Quatchi and Sumi pose for photographers in Surrey, B.C., Nov. 27, 2007. (Jonathan Hayward/Canadian Press)

Each Olympics offers an opportunity for the world to witness athletic excellence.

But the Games are also a chance for organizers to push the envelope on technology and design innovation, and the 2010 Olympic Winter Games in Vancouver are certainly no exception.

The Vancouver Organizing Committee (VANOC) for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games is the first to officially commit to applying environmental sustainability principles to the Games — from ground-level logistics to maintaining the towering ski slopes.

"We will hit a new environmental mark for Winter Games," says VANOC CEO John Furlong. "That includes systematically going after ways to reduce our [environmental] footprint from every angle and finding partners that are equally committed. We have the time to start early and achieve some significant wins in this area."

Scores of technology developers, design engineers, environmental specialists and urban planners are applying their collective creative power to turn the Vancouver Games into what they say will be a gold medal performance in sustainability.

What does this mean in practical terms?

Sporting venues, accommodations and transportation systems alike are being scrutinized to find ways to minimize their impact on the environment. Eco-friendly engine technologies are the order of the day for rail and public transit systems. Recovering waste heat from cooling systems and ice-making equipment will be common practice.

Advanced filtering and treatment technologies will reclaim wastewater for multi-purpose functions, from irrigating gardens to flushing toilets. And the organizers say that even the data centres that run the show will be the picture of economic and processing efficiency.

Going for green

VANOC's sustainability mandate outlines "three dimensions" of sustainability, explains Ann Duffy, corporate sustainability officer for VANOC.

"A large part of [sustainability] is innovation and technology," she says. "Any supplier we choose must be able to offer a product, service, process or technology that demonstrates a sustainability feature that generates notable social, environmental and economic benefits."

While the ratios can vary within venue and technology choices, she estimates that going the sustainability route can command on average a two to seven per cent cost premium with a return on investment within a three- to five-year time frame. "The savings could be in reduced energy usage or water consumption. It depends on a variety of elements."

The Olympic Oval for speed skating in Richmond, B.C., shown here under construction, has a 2.6-hectare wooden roof that uses local wood from trees killed by the pine beetle infestation. Energy-saving innovations include a ground-source heat pump system to supply energy for the ice plant.

One particular showcase for environmental technology is the Richmond Oval for speed skating. The site is being built to meet Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Silver certification standards — a system created by the United States Green Building Council to rate how "green" a building is in terms of energy use and efficiency.

If approved, the Oval will be the largest LEED Silver certified building in the world, according to Ted Townsend, senior manager of communications for the City of Richmond, B.C.

"We’ve not only taken in the environmental aspects in our design, but also the social and economic aspects," he says. "More than anything else, we want this building to be a global showcase for sustainable building practices and have it serve the needs of the community for decades to come."

Although it is a sizeable facility at 33,000 square metres, measures are being taken to reduce the Richmond Oval's environmental footprint. Energy-saving innovations include a ground-source heat pump system to supply energy for the ice plant. In turn, heat recovered from the ice plant will be used for the building's heating and cooling systems.

A point of particular pride is the 2.6-hectare wooden roof.

"It's unusual to use wood for a roof of that size, but the key is we are using local wood from trees killed by the pine beetle infestation and making it a viable construction material," explains Townsend. (Earlier this year some fungi was discovered in the roof's insulating material, but it is being replaced and the wooden parts of the roof are not affected, Olympic officials say.)

The glass facade on the north side of the oval, along with polycarbonate siding on the other sides, maximize the use of natural light and reduce energy consumption.

Even the storm-water runoff from the roof will make a lasting contribution to the local scenery. The 13 concrete buttresses used to control the flow will be embedded with relief drawings by First Nations artist Susan Point that appear in relief when water runs over them. The reclaimed water will be used to flush toilets in the facility or treated for safe release to the environment.

Water system leading way

Work continues on the expansion of the Vancouver Trade and Convention Centre, Oct. 5, 2006, that will be part of the main press centre for the 2010 Olympic Games. (Chuck Stoody/Canadian press)

The new Vancouver Convention Centre, meanwhile, will be the first building in Canada to combine ultra-filtration membrane and reverse osmosis systems to desalinate ocean water and treat wastewater for flushing toilets and irrigating a green roof garden.

The ZeeWeed ultra-filtration membrane system was developed in Canada for use in specialized commercial applications, explains Tony Kobilnyk, global trade media relations manager for GE Water & Process Technologies in Oakville, Ont.

It will capture 100 per cent of the water used in the building and reuse 75 per cent of that.

"Basically this takes away from the demand on municipal water supply and wastewater systems and makes the water supply [within the building] self-sustaining," Kobilnyk says.

An added bonus, he says, is that these ultra-filtration systems — which will also be used in other Olympic venues — can be concealed within a building because they take up half the space of conventional treatment systems.

Keeping score

While sustainability isn't the first thing one thinks of when watching scoreboards or surfing the web, VANOC is making sure no stone is left unturned in that area either.

"Technology can consume a lot of power and generate heat," says Andy Platten, vice-president of technical infrastructure for VANOC. "We've been especially proactive with the layout of our data centre, so it's optimized for power consumption and heat generation."

He estimates that the technology infrastructure will use in the region of 700 to 800 servers that have the storage capacity equivalent to 22,000 DVDs — enough storage space to hold about 36 million MP3 music files. Despite the large-sounding numbers, it's a remarkably efficient infrastructure.

Those server numbers they're citing now could shrink in the months to come given the rapid advancements in server technology, according to Platten. "With the servers we have now, we can get more processing power on a chip, consume less watts and process a lot more in a smaller physical space."

The kind of efficiency that can be squeezed out of today's server technology not only means less wasted space and energy, but also the ability to deliver more data and video content than ever before — a must in an age where observers will be expecting real-time information and images in all their glory as events unfold.

"We've already seen a big difference since Torino," says Platten. "The traffic going to our website today is eight times higher."

There's even talk of going mobile, with full-scale data centres that can fit into a tractor-trailer and be transported to remote sites. These come in at about 1/100th of the initial cost of a 10,000 square foot data centre and require about one-third the space of a conventional compute power setup, according to Sun Microsystems. Cooling costs are also 40 per cent lower.

Even when the Games are over, says Townsend, the sustainability efforts being invested in the 2010 Games will keep paying dividends to the community for years to come.

"We're creating some beautiful legacies here."

[an error occurred while processing this directive]