Ensuring London 2012 delivers a green legacy

The spotlight is on London this summer with the Olympics about to start, but for charities like Groundwork the focus is as much on the future as the here and now. The legacy of the games is what inspires us for the future.

Sustainability has been key in the creation of the Olympic Park, and in the wider planning that means London will host the greenest games ever. At Groundwork London, we have been working with Locog, a number of Olympic and Paralympic sponsors and suppliers, and a range of other stakeholders to ensure that the games leave a lasting community and environmental legacy for east London’s communities living on the periphery of the new park.

One particular programme achieving this is Transform. Delivered over the past year and running into 2013 Transform is part of the London 2012 Inspire programme and a key element of the London 2012 Changing Places programme. Using the inspiration of the games and the regeneration of the Olympic Park, Transform is currently on track to support local communities to regenerate and reactivate 70 derelict, unused and unloved spaces into vibrant new community gardens, food growing areas, riverside walks and local play areas.

Working with London Sustainability Exchange, Groundwork London has already received funding from Defra, the Sita Trust, the City Bridge Trust and the Big Lottery to work towards our goal of transforming 100 sites for 100 communities. Engaging local people has been vital from identifying suitable sites, working with us to transform them, learning how to maintain, sustain and continually enhance them and at the same time learning how they can live more sustainably.

Each of the Transform sites use natural and recycled materials and incorporate reuse and resource-saving their design. In line with the London 2012 ambitions of zero waste to landfill we will be working with Sita UK, official waste and recycling contractor, to find homes for an extraordinary range of reusable products, plants and building materials that will come from the park during and after the games have taken place.

London 2012’s Olympic Sustainability Ambassadors believe in embedding sustainability into every aspect of the games and its legacy. We recently gave the ambassadors a tour of Newham’s newly created William Paton Community Garden – one of the first Transform projects completed. Deborah Meaden and Kevin McCloud were notably impressed with the new food growing space that contains an eco-architecture shelter and seating made from recycled materials.

Developed from an overgrown, litter strewn demolition site into a space that encourages social interaction, food growing, biodiversity and relaxation in equal measure, the garden gives local flat-dwellers the opportunity to get involved outdoors and meet their neighbours in a quiet and peaceful space. They were also impressed to hear how the regeneration of the space had united members of the local community, and that some of them have now formed a local ‘friends of group’, excited about their plans for further improvements that they now feel able and inspired to achieve in their new space.

Transform has and will continue to be a huge success long after the dust has settled on the successful Olympic and Paralympic Games, and let’s hope, the Team GB medal haul. After all the action has taken place we’ll look to build new corporate sustainability programmes with some of the Olympics sponsors whose staff have kindly come out over the summer to help Transform parts of east London.

We’re also excited about sharing our experiences with Rio 2016 Games observers who are looking to learn how they too can create a sustainable legacy for the future in their country. Maybe, and we hope the London 2012 sustainability legacy will roll on and on, further than we ever thought it would, and it will be great to say we played a part of it.