SCIO press conference on progress of green Olympics and sustainability for Beijing 2022 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games
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E-mail China.org.cn, January 17, 2022
China Arab TV:
Beijing has implemented environmentally-friendly technologies in transportation, electricity supply, and water and waste management to ensure a green Olympic Games, all of which set a big example for foreign countries to follow. What are the major challenges facing all of these preparations? Thank you.
Li Sen:
Thank you for your question. As you've mentioned, the "Green Olympics" is one of the four concepts that we are following to host the Winter Games. We have adopted many related technologies in terms of transportation, electricity supply, and water and waste management. My colleagues also spoke about this topic just now.
For example, we have managed to achieve low-carbon transportation. Beijing's competition zone is situated in the plains region, and vehicles there are either fully electric or powered by natural gas. Meanwhile, those in the Yanqing and Zhangjiakou competition zones are mainly powered by hydrogen fuel to meet the transport conditions of mountainous regions. Almost all passenger cars and nearly 80% of all vehicles are energy efficient or powered by clean energy. In terms of electricity supply, Mr. Liu made a detailed introduction just now. We managed to realize a 100% renewable electricity supply by transmitting renewable energy to the competition zones in Yanqing, and other competition zones in Beijing. This has also improved the local region's capacity for utilizing renewable energy.
In terms of water, we use surface water for snowmaking in Yanqing and Zhangjiakou competition zones, and the water is collected by harvesting rain and melting snow. Both of these competition zones are equipped with high-standard domestic sewage treatment facilities which will comprehensively collect and process sewage, then it can be reused.
As for waste management, following the principle of reducing waste at the source, recycling waste into resources and managing waste in a unified way, we have implemented unified management measures and garbage sorting. In fact, the management of waste is based on different stages. For example, for waste issues that occurred during the construction process, some of the rocks in the mountainous area in Yanqing could be directly used to make gabion walls and pave roads. Likewise, several once-deserted pile heads produced during the construction of the National Speed Skating Oval were reused as raw materials to build the stands of the Oval. As for recycling waste during the Games, we will follow the unified standard for waste management and strictly enforce garbage sorting. The collection, transportation, sorting and processing of waste will be conducted in a standardized manner.
All these eco-friendly measures for Beijing 2022 not only meet the requirements of hosting a "Green Olympics" and ensure a high-standard Games but also play a proactive role in future developments, including the development of cities and industries as well as people's wellbeing.
Today marks the 22-day countdown to Beijing 2022, and all preparation work is put in place. Regarding your question about the challenges, we believe that we have the capacity to host the Games as planned. We launched a domestic test series of snow and ice sports last February and April respectively and hosted a total of 10 test events for global athletes from last October to December. These test events are a testament to our eco-friendly measures including green energy vehicles, renewable electricity supply, water recycling and waste management, and prove that our technologies are very stable and reliable and meet the standards of hosting the competition. Thank you.
Chen Wenjun:
Due to time constraints, we will have one last question.
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