Paris 2024 venues get seats made from recycled plastic

AUBERVILLIERS, France : Some 11,000 seats for the Paris Olympics on two different sites are made out of recycled plastic as organisers look to reduce the event's carbon footprint.

In their factory in Aubervilliers, just north of central Paris, Le Pave, a company created in 2018, has been turning 100 tons of recycled plastic into spectator seats for the Adidas Arena - hosting the badminton and rhythmic gymnastics events and the aquatic centre, where the diving, artistic swimming and water polo competitions will take place.

"We have a little over 50 recyclers that we work with, who collect the waste, who will sort the yellow (recycling) bins, where you have all your packaging waste in it," Benjamin Saint-Mard, commercial director of Le Pave, told Reuters.

"They will sort it, separate the different plastics. We will recover different forms of plastic, but especially those that are incinerated or buried to make the material.

"And so there, it will be cleaned, crushed, and will arrive here in the form of granules or ground material. And then we will of course check their technical capacity, that we only have one material in it. By using a thermo-compression technique, we will make the panel into fairly dense, fairly hard panels, which will allow us to make furniture with it."

(This story has been refiled to fix a typo in the reporter's name)