The 2024 Paris Olympics are alleged to be the most sustainable Olympics in history. The organizers pledged to halve their carbon emissions during the London 2012 and Rio 2016 average.
Their emissions reduction tactics include making all event venues accessible via public transportation and creating a 418 km network of cycling lanes, slashing single-use plastics in catering by 50%, connecting all the venues to Paris’ renewable energy grid, using geothermal cooling systems instead of traditional air conditioning, and providing green spaces for competitors and attendees alike. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has also launched a “reuse, reduce and rent” initiative for the sporting goods and equipment that have been used in the Games, promoting circularity and reducing waste.
The efforts of the French government in collaboration with the IOC cannot go without recognition and praise. What they have done is unprecedented and will significantly change how the Olympic Games are organized forever. However, one detail has flown under the radar: fashion. Particularly the environmental impact of making clothes, whose life cycle will potentially end once the Games end on August 13th.
Merchandise waste and “sportwashing”: a persistent issue
As event organizers and volunteers scramble to make sure every aspect of the Games is perfect, designers and textile manufacturers must come up with merchandise designs and have the clothes ready for Olympics fans. Fashion is a core part of the event, from dressing the athletes and their teams, to providing their supporters with one-of-a-kind merch to brag about. The Olympics are a complex fashion sustainability issue, as the main focus for designers is to create new merchandise to “one up” the designs of previous Games.
Additionally, fans want to demonstrate that they attended the most recent games. Yet, like a fast fashion trend, this merch is replaced the minute the next Olympics come around. And so the cycle continues every four years. It’s therefore important for us to acknowledge that the clothing rollout contributes to significant textile waste after the Games end.
According to the World Economic Forum, the equivalent of one garbage truck full of clothes is burned or dumped in a landfill every second, which amounts to about 85% of textiles going into landfills each year. The microplastics contained in the discarded clothes go on to pollute the ocean, the Earth’s soil, and the air we breathe whenever they are incinerated.
And the Olympics are not the exception to this rule. In fact, how much waste the Summer and Winter Olympic Games produce is the IOC’s best-kept secret, as there is no official data on the amount of apparel produced for teams, athletes, and fans each season or how much of it ends up in a landfill.
Sport apparel’s waste issue comes from sponsorship deals, which is heightened during the Olympics cycle. Sportswear giants like Nike, Adidas, and Puma roll out mountains of apparel and equipment for their sponsored teams during a regular (non-Olympic) season, with millions of items being used as little as twice per game.
Additionally, most of the other gear like training kits (i.e., tracksuits, tops, and shorts that players wear to practice and warm-ups) and travel wear eventually pile into mountains of obsolete – sometimes unused– apparel and equipment and eventually find their way into landfills.
Some Olympic teams have partnered with high-fashion luxury brands like Ralph-Lauren to produce uniforms for both the opening ceremony and the actual competition. However, luxury brands have been known to destroy unsold stock; who is to say they will not repeat this for the Games, despite their sustainability pledges?
Some efforts but not enough
Notably, the Tokyo Olympics organizers did try to stave off the events’ carbon footprint by imploring designers to use sustainable materials and fibers for their collections. For instance, Nike designed uniforms for Team USA using 100% recycled polyester, recycled Nike Grind rubber, and “pattern efficiency” that supposedly reduces waste. However, Nike has been under fire for years for pollution, using carbon-intensive materials, and, more importantly, human and worker rights abuses.
Some of the 2024 Paris Olympics designs also tackle sustainability head-on. For instance, the Haiti team wore team uniforms that were almost entirely upcycled from the designer’s grandmother’s dresses. The Brazilian volleyball team is also sporting jerseys made from LYCRA’s COOLMAX® EcoMade fiber, made from 100% textile waste. The Finnish team has partnered with Nordic brand Rukka, who crafted its Olympic collection from sustainable materials and textile innovations such as Spinnova®, Pure Waste®, and bio-based Sorona®, technologies made with zero harmful chemicals, wood-based fibers, and bio-based polymers. Finally, the Estonian collection features UPMADE®-certified T-shirts that are industrially upcycled and denim products that are 100% recycled.
What the 2021 Tokyo Olympics should have taught us
Hosting a worldwide sporting event during a global pandemic is hard. And so is selling sports merchandise when most people are avoiding public gatherings. The Tokyo Olympics were marked by anemic merchandise sales.
Beyond supplying professional teams with cool uniforms, fashion giants the likes of Nike, Adidas and Puma churn out millions of units of replica merch and fan jerseys every year. Leftover seasonal merchandise that isn’t liquidated is destroyed.
This is a clear case of “sports-washing,” which sees brands using the popularity of sports events to promote their products and increase sales. EarthOrg reports that most clothing today is worn only seven to ten times before being tossed. Again, the Olympics are definitely not exempt from these production and consumption behaviors without hundreds of thousands of replica team fan items being unleashed onto the clothing market at every iteration of the games. Even athletes themselves throw away their seasonal uniforms in the trash once the Olympics are over, like the Mexican softball team at the 2021 Tokyo Olympics.
While wanting to support your favorite team is understandable, the excessive consumption and overproduction associated with sports merchandising muddies the waters of what truly sustainable Olympic Games look like.
While the detailed merchandise sales figures of the 2021 Tokyo Olympics remain unknown, Japanese merchandise vendors barely sold a third of their product. This left tens of thousands of goods on the stadium shelves. And those who had purchased and worn official Olympics memorabilia were met with an onslaught of public shaming and full-fledged ostracism, forcing them to donate their goods or throw them away.
While global pandemics are unpredictable, the industry still has to decide if it wants to evolve with the growing demand for greener textile manufacturing or be replaced by game changers who do. What fuels the “sportswashing” that is ever present in the Olympics is overconsumption and the commercialization of FOMO.
The people who attended the sporting event wanted to show that off, and those who didn’t still want to be a part of the global hype. Rinse and repeat when the next Games come around. The industry has some serious reforming to do, starting with how they measure merchandise output. One way to address overproduction is by eliminating the need to guess what people are going to buy so that brands don’t overproduce both fan merchandise and team uniforms. Shortening production times to be responsive to what customers are actually buying is another solution, too.
The promise of 100% green Olympics certainly raises more questions about the role of apparel in the Games’ sustainability goals. Perhaps we would all be better off just focusing on the friendly competition among the athletes of the highest caliber instead of engaging in our own waste Olympics.
– Emmanuelle Mphuthi
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