Greenwash

The promised measures, particularly the village design and the environmental guidelines, were heralded as a major environmental breakthrough in urban design. "No other event at the beginning of the 21st Century will have a greater impact on protecting the environment than the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney," stated a SOBL news release. New South Wales minister Bruce Baird said that Sydney’s Olympics would be an environmental showpiece to the rest of the world and a model for other cities to follow in future games (SOBL 1992). Ros Kelly, the Federal Minister for Environment, Sport and Territories, also put out a news release arguing that "a vote by the international community for Sydney will be a vote for the environment" (Kelly 1993).

Once the bid was won, however, the government’s lack of genuine commitment to a green Olympics became apparent. It discarded the winning village design, the one that was supposed to be a showcase of green technology. The consortium of architects that had designed the village, including the Greenpeace-commissioned architects, complained of being "absolutely shafted". Within a year, Greenpeace was forced to denounce the government’s failure to keep to the environmental guidelines written by Short and Bell.

Cost considerations also led the planners to quietly shelve another environmental showcase, the Olympic Pavilion and Visitors Centre. The original design had envisaged a centre made of recycled materials with natural ventilation.

In 1994, Paul Gilding resigned as head of Greenpeace International and went into business for himself as an environmental consultant. One of his clients was Lend Lease/Mirvac, the same company that had participated in behind-the-scenes strategizing to win the Sydney bid. Lend Lease was hired to draw up a new plan for the athletes’ village. The new village design, unveiled in 1995, was touted as environmental because it used solar technology, even though the plans called for the use of polyvinyl chloride (PVC) as a building material.

Greenpeace has campaigned internationally against the use of PVCs, and the environmental guidelines which it helped draft for the Sydney Olympic Games had called for "minimizing and ideally avoiding the use of chlorine-based products (organochlorines) such as PCB, PVC and chlorinated bleached paper". The Olympic Coordination Authority’s decision to abandon this commitment came in the wake of a deliberate public relations campaign by the plastics and chemical industry.

In 1995, Andrew Byrne of the Sydney Morning Herald revealed how Australia’s Plastics and Chemical Industries Association (PACIA) was financing a campaign to undermine commitments to a PVC-free Games. PACIA was concerned that making the village a PVC-free showpiece would add momentum to the Greenpeace campaign against organochlorines–a reasonable fear, since that was precisely the point behind the original environmental recommendations.

Using contributions from member companies, the PACIA launched a PVC Defence Action Fund for the purpose of bringing pro-PVC experts from Europe to brief key government officials. Other tactics detailed in a document obtained by Byrne included enlarging its Olympic lobbying program, developing a "credibility file" on Greenpeace, and promoting the benefits of PVC on the internet. PVC manufacturer James Hardie even became a member of the Olympic Village planning consortium.(Byrne 1995)

The government continued with its own PR activities, offering guided tours of the Olympic site to the public, and announcing a major tree-planting effort coordinated by a "Greener Sydney 2000" committee, which would provide "a unique opportunity to involve the whole community in the 2000 Olympics". A landscaping project for the site was heralded as greening the site, even though the toxic waste beneath remained untreated (Moore 1997, p. 4).

As evidence of toxic contamination of the site filtered out, environmentalists involved in the Olympics bidding began to change their stories. In 1995, Four Corners, the ABC’s major television current affairs program, featured Greenpeace and Kate Short criticizing the cover-up of the site’s toxic contamination (which they had known about all along, but had previously refrained from mentioning).

In subsequent years, Greenpeace staged various actions to highlight dioxin contamination in the vicinity of the Olympic site. "Our investigations show that not only is the ‘Green Games’ concept rapidly becoming a cynical farce, but that the presence of high levels of dioxin at Homebush Bay presents a real environmental and health threat", stated one Greenpeace news release. David Richmond, the head of the Olympic Coordination Authority (OCA), responded by accusing green groups who highlighted toxic contamination of the Games site as doing "damage to Australia" (Hogarth 1997a).

A number of revelations about dioxin on the Homebush site posed another public relations crisis for the OCA in 1997. Colin Grant, OCA’s executive director of planning, environment and policy, publicly stated that the site did not contain any 2,3,7,8 TCDD (the most toxic form of dioxin). After this statement was proven false, the OCA was forced to "unreservedly" apologize for the "mistake" (Hogarth 1997b).

Hired by OCA as an "environmental special adviser," Kate Short organized a series of forums in 1998 on "Dioxin and Beyond: Enhancing Remediation Strategies at Homebush." In reality, the forums were carefully staged public relations events aimed at creating the appearance of public consultation without the openness that true public involvement would have required. Attendance was by invitation only, and the forums primarily showcased speakers dwelling on good news about the remediation.

Following the forum series, in what seemed like an attempt to give the forums a veneer of having been a real consultation, the Australian government announced that a further $11.6 million would be spent for an "enhanced remediation program" which would consist of validation, monitoring and "education and community development" involving school children, but no further treatment of the wastes.

As the pressure mounted for public disclosure of documents relevant to the Sydney bid, the Games promoters turned again to using the cover of a private company in order to maintain secrecy, claiming that its financial documents belonged to internal auditors who were a private firm and therefore exempt from Freedom of Information rules (Clark 1999).

Although involvement in the Olympic Games has been an environmental embarrassment, it has also been a goldmine of opportunities for the individuals and organizations that supported the Sydney bid. The Sydney Morning Herald became a "Team Millennium Partner" for the Games, and it established a unit to "maximize the associated commercial opportunities".

Karla Bell and Paul Gilding both left Greenpeace to become consultants to companies seeking contracts to construct Olympic facilities. Both have also participated as paid consultants in preparing Stockholm’s bid for the 2004 Olympics.

By contrast, Robert Cartmel, the Greenpeace campaigner whose misgivings kept him from joining in the campaign to greenwash Homebush Bay, has since been squeezed out of his job.

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Byrne, Andrew (1995) 'Secret fund set up in bid to derail 'green' Olympics', Sydney Morning Herald, 26 August.

Clark, Pilita (1999) 'Slippery Olympics: Why We're in the dark', Sydney Morning Herald, 8 March, pp. 1-2.

Kelly, Ros (1993) 'World Environment Day and our environmental olympics', 5 June.

Hogarth, Murray (1997a) 'Toxic talk poisons Olympic relations', Sydney Morning Herald, 19 July.

Hogarth, Murray (1997b) 'Olympic village gets all-clear over dioxin', Sydney Morning Herald, 24 July, p. 5.

Moore, Matthew (1997) '$120 million to green Olympic site', Sydney Morning Herald, 19 February, p. 4.

SOBL, (1992) 'Committee to Ensure Sydney Games are Green', News Release, 21 December.

SOBL, (1993) Sydney 2000 Environment Guidelines, March.

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