Greenwashing an Olympic-sized toxic dump

By Dr Sharon Beder

When the Olympic Games begin in the year 2000, you
can expect to see them hyped as the "greenest"
summer Olympics of all time. But a massive toxic waste dump
will lie underneath the fine landscaping of the Olympic site.
It will be covered by a metre of dirt and a mountain of public
relations.

Homebush Bay in Sydney is a former industrial site and
armaments depot subjected to years of unregulated waste
dumping. In recent years, asbestos-contaminated waste and
chemicals including dioxins and pesticides have been found
there, along with arsenic, cadmium, chromium, copper, lead,
mercury and zinc.

It is the worst toxic waste dump in Australia, and the bay
into which the waste leaches is so contaminated that there is
a fishing ban. The sediments in the bay have concentrations of
dioxin that make it one of the world's worst dioxin hot spots.
The dioxin is largely the result of waste from a Union Carbide
factory which manufactured the notorious herbicide Agent
Orange there during the Vietnam War.

This massive toxic waste site has been transformed into a
"green showcase" thanks, in large part, to the
endorsement of Greenpeace and other key environmentalists.

Bashing Beijing

Part of the story of Sydney's public relations campaign to
win the 2000 Olympics came to light through investigations
into the scandal over Salt Lake City's bribery of the
International Olympic Committee (IOC), which is responsible
for selecting between competing cities' bids. In a major
report in the Sydney Morning Herald (SMH), Gerard
Ryle and Gary Hughes revealed a plan by key Australian
businesspeople and government officials to discredit a bid by
Beijing, which was then thought to be the front-runner.

Sydney's secret PR strategy was developed by
representatives of industries which stood to benefit
financially if the Olympics bid succeeded. They included the
managing director of Lend Lease (one of Australia's largest
construction companies), the managing director of Optus, and a
corporate lawyer and close adviser to media mogul Kerry
Packer.

In December 1992, these individuals met with the NSW
premier, John Fahey, to discuss how China's human rights
record could be used to damage its bid, and also how to
deflect expected criticism of Sydney's bid from the media,
Aborigines, environmentalists and trade unionists. The group
agreed to hire a public relations strategist to help them.

An unofficial committee, named after businessman Ross
Turnbull, who had organised the meeting, continued to steer
the bid from behind the scenes. Three international members
were added to the committee, including James Wolfensohn, the
Australian-born president of the World Bank. The "Beijing
strategy" was put together by the Turnbull committee with
the help of Gabrielle Melville, a former BHP public relations
strategist, and Sir Tim Bell, former head of Saatchi and
Saatchi advertising company in Australia and adviser to
Margaret Thatcher (which earned him the knighthood).

The Beijing strategy involved covertly funding a human
rights group to campaign against China's human rights abuses
in the lead up to the games decision. The campaign was to be
based in Europe or the United States to divert suspicion from
Australia.

A book was to be published on the same topic, and "an
eminent international identity" would be paid to have his
name on the book. A story would also be "planted" in
the London Times newspaper.

Sydney games officials claim that this plan was never
implemented, but in the months leading up to the bid decision
in 1993 there was a US-based human rights campaign that
damaged Beijing's bid.

Selling Sydney

A veil of secrecy was wrapped around the strategising for
the Sydney bid by establishing a private company called Sydney
Olympics 2000 Bid Limited (SOBL) to oversee the bidding
process. As a private company, SOBL was exempt from Freedom of
Information requests, thus protecting it from having to
disclose its internal reports and documents. SOBL's articles
of association ensured that information was tightly
controlled.

Secrecy was further enhanced through various arrangements
with the media. A Communications Commission was formed to be
in charge of PR strategies, chaired by the managing director
of the Clemengers advertising agency. Other members of the
commission included the national director of advertising for
Australian Consolidated Press, the media director of the
premier's office and the general manager of marketing for the
Ampol oil company.

A remarkable admission of the media's complicity in the
bidding process came in February 1999 from Bruce Baird, a
former NSW government minister responsible for the bidding
process. Baird claimed that he had obtained the agreement of
three major media executives not to run stories about the
wining, dining and other blandishments offered to IOC
officials.

The three executives named by Baird were Kerry Packer
(owner of Consolidated Press Holdings), Ken Cowley (chief
executive of Rupert Murdoch's News Ltd) and John Alexander
(then editor-in-chief of the SMH). All three have
vehemently denied Baird's claims, describing them as
"absolute bullshit" and "rubbish", and
Baird has subsequently recanted.

What is known, however, is that Packer, Cowley and
Alexander all accepted invitations to sit on the SOBL
committee. All of the Australian commercial television
channels, the three main media companies and a number of radio
stations were involved in supporting the bid, either through
being on bid committees or through direct sponsorship of the
bid. While the bidding was under way, SMH journalist
Mark Coultan stated, "Journalists who write stories which
might be seen as critical are reminded of their bosses'
support and told that their stories would be used against
Sydney by other cities".

The SMH also editorialised in support of the
Sydney bid and SOBL financed the fare of a SMH
journalist to Monaco to report on the bid deliberations.
Another SMH journalist, Sam North, was assigned to
report on the Olympics and wrote a succession of favourable
stories, several of which appeared in advertising supplements
funded by Olympic sponsors. News Ltd's Telegraph
Mirror also gave unwavering good PR to the bid.

Greenpeace buys in

As the bidding and selection process got under way, the
International Olympic Committee (IOC) made it clear that it
wanted to have a "green" Olympics. IOC president
Juan Antonio Samaranch said the IOC's primary concern would be
to ensure the environment is respected and that this would be
taken into account in the final vote on site selection. For
Australia, therefore, it was critical to present itself as
"green", despite the toxic waste buried at Homebush
Bay.

The cooption of Greenpeace Australia was a key factor in
the success of this campaign. Greenpeace has campaigned
against hazardous landfill dumps for many years, so its
support for the Homebush Bay site helped reassure a public
that might otherwise be concerned about the site's toxic
history.

To win over Greenpeace, SOBL invited them to draw up
environmental guidelines for construction and operation of the
Olympic facilities. The proposed design of the Athletes'
Village was developed by a consortium of architects including
a firm commissioned by Greenpeace Australia.

On paper, the design looked impressive. It provided for use
of solar technology and solar designs, state-of-the-art energy
generation and waste water recycling systems.

For Greenpeace, participation in developing a showcase
Olympic village offered another benefit: the opportunity to
transform its own image. Instead of simply sounding the alarm
on environmental problems as it had done for the previous 20
years, the "new Greenpeace" would be seen as
promoting solutions.

Greenpeace involvement in the Sydney bid soon went beyond
simply offering ideas, as it became a vocal supporter. Karla
Bell, Greenpeace Australia's cities and coasts campaigner,
made a statement supporting the environmental merits of the
full bid when the IOC visited Sydney early in 1993. Her
statement did not mention the problem of land contamination.

She made an obvious impression on the IOC, whose report in
July that year "noted with much satisfaction the great
emphasis being placed on environmental protection in all
aspects of the bidding process and the attention being paid to
working closely with environmental protection groups such as
Greenpeace".

Support also came from Paul Gilding, then head of
Greenpeace International, who previously had headed Greenpeace
Australia. "The Olympic village provides a prototype of
future environmentally friendly development not only for
Australia, but for cities all around the world", Gilding
stated in a March 1993 news release.

SOBL hired Bell and Kate Short (now Kate Hughes) of
Sydney's Total Environment Centre (TEC) to draw up
environmental guidelines for the games.

Short had a long history of campaigning on toxic issues,
particularly pesticides. The guidelines drawn up by Bell and
Short advocated the use of recyclable and recycled building
materials, the use of plantation timber as opposed to forest
timber and tickets printed on "recycled post consumer
waste paper". Short and other environmentalists and
consultants were also appointed to a special environmental
task force advising SOBL.

Some environmentalists, however, remained sceptical. The
TEC distanced itself from Short's involvement, and TEC
director Jeff Angel argued that the Sydney Olympic bid was
ignoring significant environmental problems. "The state
of Sydney's environment has been misrepresented to a serious
degree", he said. "For example, the [NSW] Premier in
his Introduction to the Bid's Fact Sheets describes the games
as occurring in a pollution-free environment. The bid document
asserts Sydney's waste system can cope, when in fact we have a
waste crisis."

Environmentalists were also concerned about the diversion
of revenue into extravagant sports facilities and the loss of
valued local ecosystems.

Environmentalists were particularly angry when they
discovered that the official bid document to the IOC claimed
support from the Australian Conservation Foundation, the NSW
Nature Conservation Council and the TEC. Although individuals
affiliated with those organisations had joined the bid
committee's environmental task force, the groups themselves
emphatically denied their support and the statement had to be
retracted.

Notwithstanding these misgivings, the issue of toxic
contamination of the site was not openly discussed prior to
the Olympic decision. This was clearly because of the
inaccessibility of relevant information and the successful
cooption of key environmentalists who reassured others that
the site was being cleaned up properly.

In private communications during the bidding process,
Greenpeace Australia toxics campaigner Robert Cartmel told me,
"There is every likelihood that the remediation measures
being undertaken at Homebush Bay won't measure up". He
warned, "When it comes to leakage of toxic materials, it
is not a question of if, it is a question of when. There is no
such thing as a safe landfill." Yet Cartmel was unwilling
to publicly criticise Greenpeace's involvement in the Olympics
bidding process.

This brochure, published by the Australian Olympic bidders,
highlighted the bid's endorsement from Greenpeace.

The promised measures, particularly the village design and
the environmental guidelines, were heralded as a major
environmental breakthrough in urban design.

"No other event at the beginning of the 21st Century
will have a greater impact on protecting the environment than
the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney", stated a SOBL news
release. Baird said that Sydney's Olympics would be an
environmental showpiece to the rest of the world and a model
for other cities to follow in future games. Ros Kelly, the
federal minister for the environment and sport, also put out a
news release arguing, "A vote by the international
community for Sydney will be a vote for the environment".

From rhetoric to reality

Once the bid was won, however, the government's lack of
commitment to a green Olympics became apparent. It discarded
the winning village design, the one that was supposed to be a
showcase of green technology.

The consortium of architects that had designed the village,
including the Greenpeace-commissioned architects, complained
of being "absolutely shafted". Within a year,
Greenpeace was forced to denounce the government's failure to
keep to the environmental guidelines written by Short and
Bell.

Cost considerations also led the planners to quietly shelve
another environmental showcase, the Olympic pavilion and
visitors' centre. The original design had envisioned a centre
made of recycled materials with natural ventilation.

In 1994, Gilding resigned as head of Greenpeace
International and went into business as an environmental
consultant. One of his clients was Lend Lease/Mirvac. Lend
Lease was hired to draw up a new plan for the athletes'
village.

The new village design, unveiled in 1995, was touted as
environmental because it used solar technology, even though
more than half the houses were temporary structures, designed
to be taken down later. Worse yet, from the perspective of
Greenpeace, the plans called for the use of polyvinyl chloride
(PVC) as a building material.

Greenpeace has campaigned internationally against the use
of PVCs, and the environmental guidelines which it helped
draft for the Sydney Olympic Games had called for
"minimising and ideally avoiding the use of
chlorine-based products (organochlorines) such as PCB, PVC and
chlorinated bleached paper". The Olympic Coordination
Authority's (OAC) decision to abandon this commitment came in
the wake of a deliberate PR campaign by the plastics and
chemical industry.

In 1995, the SMH's Andrew Byrne revealed how
Australia's Plastics and Chemical Industries Association was
financing a campaign to undermine commitments to a PVC-free
games. The PACIA was concerned that making the village a
PVC-free showpiece would add momentum to the Greenpeace
campaign against organochlorines — a reasonable fear, since
that was precisely the point behind the original environmental
recommendations.

Using contributions from member companies, the PACIA
launched a PVC Defence Action Fund to bring pro-PVC experts
from Europe to brief key government officials. Other tactics
detailed in a document obtained by Byrne included enlarging
its Olympic lobbying program, developing a "credibility
file" on Greenpeace and promoting the benefits of PVC on
the internet. PVC manufacturer James Hardie even became a
member of the Olympic village planning consortium.

The government continued with its own PR activities,
offering guided tours of the Olympic site to the public and
announcing a major tree planting effort coordinated by the
"Greener Sydney 2000" committee which would provide
"a unique opportunity to involve the whole community in
the 2000 Olympics". A landscaping project for the site
was heralded as greening the site, even though the toxic waste
remained untreated beneath.

As evidence of toxic contamination of the site filtered
out, environmentalists involved in the bidding began to change
their stories. In 1995, a major television current affairs
program featured Greenpeace and Short criticising the cover-up
of the site's toxic contamination (which they had known about
all along, but had previously refrained from mentioning).

In subsequent years Greenpeace staged two actions to
highlight dioxin contamination in the vicinity of the Olympic
site. "Our investigations show that not only is the
'Green Games' concept rapidly becoming a cynical farce, but
that the presence of high levels of dioxin at Homebush Bay
presents a real environmental and health threat", stated
one Greenpeace news release. David Richmond, the head of the
OCA responded by accusing green groups who highlighted toxic
contamination of the games site as doing "damage to
Australia".

A number of revelations about dioxin on the Homebush site
posed another public relations crisis for the OCA in 1997.
Colin Grant, OCA's executive director of planning, environment
and policy, publicly stated that the site did not contain any
2,3,7,8 TCDD (the most toxic form of dioxin). After this
statement was proven false, the OCA was forced to
"unreservedly" apologise for the
"mistake".

Damage control

Hired by OCA as an "environmental special
adviser", Short organised a series of forums in 1998
titled "Dioxin and Beyond: Enhancing Remediation
Strategies at Homebush". In reality, the forums were
carefully staged PR events aimed at creating the appearance of
public consultation without the openness that true public
involvement would require. Attendance was by invitation only
and the forums primarily showcased speakers dwelling on good
news about the remediation.

Afterwards, in what seemed like an attempt to give the
forums a veneer of having been a real consultation, the
Australian government announced that a further $11.6 million
would be spent for an "Enhanced Remediation Program"
which would consist of validation, monitoring and
"education and community development" involving
school children, but no further treatment of the wastes.

As the pressure has mounted for public disclosure of
documents relevant to the Sydney bid, the games promoters have
turned again to using the cover of a private company in order
to maintain secrecy, claiming that its financial documents
belong to internal auditors who are a private firm and
therefore exempt from Freedom of Information rules.

Although involvement in the Olympic Games has been an
environmental embarrassment, it has also been a goldmine of
opportunities for the individuals who supported the Sydney
bid. The SMH is now a "team millennium
partner" for the games and has established a unit to
"maximise the associated commercial opportunities".
Both Bell and Gilding have left Greenpeace to become
consultants to companies seeking contracts to construct
Olympic facilities. They have also participated as paid
consultants in preparing Stockholm's bid for the 2004
Olympics.

By contrast, Cartmel, whose misgivings kept him from
joining in the campaign to greenwash Homebush Bay, has since
been squeezed out of his job.

[Abridged from PR Watch. Sharon Beder is associate
professor in Science and Technology Studies at the University
of Wollongong. She has written several books, including
Global Spin: The Corporate Assault on
Environmentalism, 1997, Scribe Publications. Her web site
is at HREF="http://www.uow.edu.au/arts/sts/sbeder/"><http://www
.uow.edu.au/arts/sts/sbeder/>.]

From GLW issue 387