2024 Olympics – Japan places a focus on sustainability

By Anders Lorenzen

Just months before the biggest sporting event of the 2024 calendar kicks off, the 2024 Olympic Games, held in Paris, the Japanese team has introduced a key sustainability element. 

The team aims to shine a light on an often-forgotten element in the sports industry – the carbon footprint of sports clothing.

Unveiling the Olympic kit that they would wear on the podium and at press conferences will have the amount of carbon dioxide emitted during production stamped on them, in a nod to the green goals put forth by the host city.

The team’s warm-up suit jacket shows 8.8 kg of carbon dioxide equivalents (CO2e) were emitted in its production while bottoms show 5.5 kg of CO2e.

This could also be seen as a key marketing opportunity for the Japanese sports brand Asics who have produced the country’s kits. The company based in Tokyo, the capital of Japan said it reduced emissions on the official kits by about 34% from the last Games in Tokyo by using recycled and lighter material as well as renewable energy at its factory in Japan.

The manager of the popular global sports brand’s apparel and equipment development Makoto Ohori said “The Paris Games are billed as the most sustainability-focused event in Olympic history, so we adhered to that concept.”

Most ambitious yet

The showcasing of green credentials has become an obligatory part of recent Games, but Paris 2024’s goal is the most ambitious yet: to halve the carbon footprint compared with the average of 3.5 million tonnes of CO2 emissions in previous Summer Olympics.

At the previous, pandemic-delayed Summer Games held in Tokyo in 2021, almost all non-consumable items were recycled and emissions were reduced through the use of hydrogen-powered energy and vehicles, according to the 2020 organisers.

Ohori explained that he hoped this initiative would raise the bar of the sustainability targets of athletes: “By figuring out the carbon footprint of each item and labelling it on the products, we hope to boost transparency as well as raise awareness among athletes towards the environment.”

The Paris Olympics will be held from July 26th-August 11th.