Tokyo 2020 Olympics: How this session is different

Hi, everyone!

Happy summer break if you are in Northern Hemisphere and happy winter break if you are in Southern Hemisphere. If you don't have summer or winter break, just have a good day!

I listened to a new song of drama OST and I will say this to you: whatever you are going through right now, it's ok. You'll be fine. You will have a bright future ahead of you :)

If you love sport or if you read these days news, you will know that Tokyo 2020 Olympics is happening!

I can say that I love sports since I was a kid. I loved watching football, MotoGP, F1, tennis, badminton, boxing, and UFC. Especially for football, MotoGP, and badminton, I stayed all night to watch live matches, collected team or player photos and watched live matches in the stadium. I had my favourite teams, players, and even stadiums! But since I was a bachelor student, I didn't have time to follow all those things.

However, you might know that there was Euro Cup 2021 and Copa America 2021 a few weeks ago. I didn't watch but I followed some updates. But now, it's Olympics! There are Indonesian athletes, especially badminton! So, I decided to watch some games. Indonesian badminton team has 6 matches today. I didn't watch all full matches or live matches. I watched highlights of 3 matches and watched 3 live matches. The Indonesian team has 3 wins and 3 losses. Apart from those games, I found the interesting game from women's double match between Korea and Japan. Their fighting spirit was amazing!

After watching those matches, I decided to write about this special Olympics. Why is it special? Yes, due to pandemics, there are so many restrictions and rules. You might know that this is the first time for having no spectators in Olympic Games. After much deliberation over whether spectators would be allowed, due to pandemics, this year’s Olympic Games will have no domestic or foreign spectators. It means that less carbon footprint and emission produced compared to previous seasons. I found this article: https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/news/tokyo-olympics-2021-climate-change-b1885491.html.

Tokyo Olympics is aiming to be the greenest-ever Games. Do you know their slogan? Their slogan is “Be better, together —For the planet and the people” – is climate-friendly. It's so promising!

A climate-friendly slogan is not only from reducing carbon footprint since there are no local or international spectators, but also from the sustainable building, material, consumption, and energy. Tokyo Olympics organisers said they would use sustainable materials where possible, from stadiums to accommodation and even the medals, which would be made from raw materials harvested from “urban mines”, such as mobile phones, and the podiums are fabricated from recycled plastic, according to the sustainability plan for the Games. Athletes would sleep on cardboard beds, which will be recycled after the event. The mattresses would be also fully recyclable. Hydrogen, which emits no carbon dioxide when burned, would be used as fuel for the Olympics torches and cauldrons.

The allure of cardboard furniture

If you don't know why hydrogen is used for renewable energy options, I will share what I got from my course. Hydrogen fuel can be produced through several methods. The most common methods today are natural gas reforming (a thermal process), and electrolysis. Other methods include solar-driven and biological processes. I had a practical class to produce hydrogen fuel from the electrolysis process and I had an assignment to simulate the hydrogen produced using HOMER. So, basically, water will be separated into oxygen and hydrogen through a process called electrolysis. Electrolytic processes will take place in an electrolyzer (this machine is quite expensive, that's why this energy option is not cheap), which functions much like a fuel cell in reverse—instead of using the energy of a hydrogen molecule as a fuel cell does, an electrolyzer creates hydrogen from water molecules. The common problem of hydrogen as an energy source, we will need hydrogen storage! The size will be bigger if we want to save more hydrogen.

The Tokyo Olympics Organisers set five main sustainability themes, which Tokyo 2020, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government, the Government of Japan and other delivery partners work on in preparations for and operations of the Games. Besides, Tokyo Olympics formulated the Tokyo 2020 Sustainable Sourcing Code as a tool to ensure sustainability throughout the supply chains of products and services Tokyo Olympics Organisers procures as well as licensed products. If you want to know more about the sustainability concept in this Olympic Games, you can read here: https://olympics.com/tokyo-2020/en/games/sustainability/.

The summary of all actions and ideas can be seen in the following infographic as well.

So, if I can ask a question, do you have any other ideas to apply the sustainability concept in this game?

Thank you for reading ^^