The world’s best athletes will receive their gold medals at the Paris Olympic and Paralympic Games while standing on trash. Recycled food containers, to be exact.
The silver-coloured Olympic podiums, being raised across France, were made in a small factory on the outskirts of Paris by a start-up called Le Pavé using 100 per cent recycled plastic. It’s a first for any Olympic Games.
“There is an overabundance of plastic that is harming the environment, but which also has proven economic potential if it can be repurposed,” said Maurius Hamelot, 29, the co-founder of Le Pavé, as he darted around his plant, a converted steel foundry.
That’s not all: Le Pavé also made 11,000 bleacher seats for two nearby sports arenas — from used shampoo bottles and millions of bottle caps.
Just a few years ago, the company had only three employees. But an unexpected call from Olympic organisers led to a beefy contract, and the company has expanded to a staff of 34 and opened two factories. In the process, it has become a poster child for the Paris Olympic committee, which has pledged to make these Games the greenest in history.
Le Pavé is part of an increasingly dynamic start-up culture that has been growing in France, seeded by ambitious policies from President Emmanuel Macron’s government to transform the economy with new industries focusing on clean technology and a green transition.
“It used to be considered a start-up if you just developed software,” said Jim Pasquet, 31, Le Pavé’s other co-founder. “We are a new type of industrial start-up, focused on environmental needs, and our goal is to become a European leader.”
Hamelot had already been working to convert plastic waste into high-quality components for the building sector. As an architecture student at the University of Versailles in France, he had set his sights on the construction industry, one of the biggest sources of carbon emissions.
Hamelot bought a used pizza oven and began to experiment with melting discarded plastic from electronic detritus, including old coffee makers and telephone handsets that he chopped up in a blender. In 2018, he and Pasquet, friends since childhood, created Le Pavé and won a series of innovation competitions that got them into La Ruche, an incubator in Paris with a focus on social entrepreneurship and digital technology, where they raised modest funding.
By 2019, they had patented a thermal compression molding technology for use in the building sector. Soon after, Hamelot got a call from Solideo, the French company overseeing infrastructure for the 2024 Games, including a new Olympic Village in the northern suburbs of Seine-Saint-Denis that was designed to promote zero waste.
The organisers, who were seeking to slash planet-warming emissions in half compared with previous Games, asked if they would be able to produce 11,000 chairs for a new Olympic Aquatic Center being built to host swimming, and the new Adidas Arena, which would hold gymnastics and badminton competitions.
Seeded with money from BPI, a French state investment bank that focuses on start-ups, they settled into an abandoned steel factory.
Hamelot and Pasquet worked with 50 local recycling companies to gather used plastic, experimenting with dozens of prototypes and stress testing before inking a final deal with Solideo in 2022 for the stadium chairs.
Armed with a philosophy that asserts working locally can have a big social impact, they hired employees from Seine-Saint-Denis, including people who had been on long-term unemployment, an asylum-seeker and a former prisoner.
The company asked a non-governmental organisation, Lemon Tree, to include 50 elementary and middle schools in the Ile-de-France region. Around 1,700 schoolchildren collected 1 million yellow bottle caps that were used to infuse the black-and-white stadium chairs with flecks of colour.
All told, Le Pavé used 100 metric tons of recycled bottles and bottle caps to make panels for the 11,000 stadium seats. To create the panels used for the 68 silver-hued Olympic victory podiums, Le Pavé used 18 metric tonnes of recycled plastic and plastic foam food containers.
On a recent day, eight people bustled around the factory in Aubervilliers, where a rainbow of recycled plastic beads and chips stood in huge sacks. Some workers used a forklift to feed beads into a special heater, while others guided the finished panels through a cutting machine.
They are opening a second small factory in the Burgundy region of eastern France, and are raising funding to open two more in the west and in the south. As the government seeks to reindustrialise France, Le Pavé’s aim is to create jobs by opening small factories, Pasquet said, adding that the old model of mega factories no longer meet today’s environmental and social challenges.
NYTNS
