Last month, it was the little wind farm. A week ago, the waste
management infrastructure. Now, it's a 427-foot wind turbine
once slated for Olympic Park. Everywhere you look, London's 2012
Olympics have scrapped or hedged on some aspect of their
environmental goals, casting doubt on whether there's even such
a thing as Green Games. London won the Olympic bid in 2005 on a
platform of sustainability, pushing itself onto the
International Olympic Committee as a model of eco-chic and onto
the British public as a chance to redevelop the seedier parts of
the city. The government vowed to "transform the heart of East
London" and "make the Olympic Park a blueprint for sustainable
living." It would be, they said, the "greenest games in modern
times." Five years on, there've been plenty of incremental
successes -- Hopkins Architects's velodrome (above) is light as
a feather and NORD's recently completed substation (below) made
clever use of demolition scrap from Kings Yard -- but there've
also been plenty of failures.