This summer, the world's top athletes will accept their gold medals at the Paris Olympic and Paralympic Games by standing on trash — recycled food containers to be exact.
The silver Olympic podiums now being installed across France have been made from 100 percent recycled plastic by a start-up called Le Pavé in a small factory outside Paris – a first for the Olympics.
“Plastic is in abundance and has a negative impact on the environment, but it has proven economic viability if it can be reused,” Le Pavé co-founder Maurius Hamelo, 29, said as he walked around his company's factory, a converted steel foundry.
But that's not all: Le Pavé also created the 11,000 seats in two nearby sports arenas built for the Olympics, all made from used shampoo bottles and millions of colorful bottle caps.
Just a few years ago, the company had just three employees, but after an unexpected call from Olympic organizers, it landed a big contract, grew its workforce to 34, opened two factories and, in the process, became the poster child for the Paris Olympic Committee, which has vowed to make the Games the greenest in history.
Le Pavé is part of an increasingly dynamic start-up culture that is growing in France, fuelled by President Emmanuel Macron's government's ambitious policies to transform the economy with new industries focused on clean technology and the green transition.
“Previously, if you just developed software you were considered a startup,” says Le Pavé's other co-founder, Jim Pasquet, 31. “We're a new type of industrial startup focused on environmental needs, and our goal is to become a leader in Europe.”
Hamelo was already working on an initiative to turn plastic waste collected in Paris neighborhoods into high-quality components for the building industry. As an architecture student at the University of Versailles, he had his eye on the construction industry, one of the biggest sources of carbon emissions.
“Waste and trash are common in construction, all over the world,” he says. “How do you repurpose the materials you use in construction without harming the environment?”
Hamelo bought a second-hand pizza oven, pulverized old coffee makers, phones and other electronic scraps in a blender, and began experimenting with melting waste plastic. In 2018, Pasquet and Hamelo, childhood friends, founded Le Pavé and won a series of innovation competitions, gaining entry into La Ruche, a Paris-based incubator that focuses on social entrepreneurship, digital tech, and craft and culture, and raising a small amount of funding.
By 2019, they had patented the thermo-compression molding technology for use in the construction sector, and soon after, Hamelo got a call from Solideo, the French company overseeing infrastructure for the 2024 Olympics, including a new Olympic Village to be built on the northern outskirts of Seine-Saint-Denis to promote zero waste.
Organizers, who were aiming to halve global-warming emissions compared with the last Games, asked if 11,000 chairs could be made for the new Olympic Aquatic Centre being built to host the swimming events, and for the new Adidas Arena where gymnastics and badminton will take place.
“It was an incredible opportunity,” Paske said.
They received funding from BPI, a French state investment bank that specializes in start-ups, and settled in an abandoned steel factory in Aubervilliers, a low-income suburb of Paris that is home to many Olympic venues.
Hamellot and Paske worked with 50 local recycling companies to collect used plastic, then built and stress-tested dozens of prototypes before signing a final contract with Solideo for the stadium seating in 2022.
Embracing the idea that working locally can have a greater social impact, they hired staff from the Seine-Saint-Denis department, including the long-term unemployed, asylum seekers looking for a new start, and former prisoners.
The company also added an educational dimension, enlisting the non-governmental organization Lemon Tree to target 50 primary and secondary schools in the Île-de-France region: Around 1,700 pupils collected one million yellow bottle caps, which were used to decorate the black and white stadium seats with coloured specks.
The children, learning about recycling, peppered Hamellot with tough questions about the environmental impact of plastics and how to reduce carbon emissions. “They were critical and engaged,” he said.
Le Pavé used a total of 100 tonnes of recycled bottles and bottle caps to make the panels for the stadium's 11,000 seats, which were pressed by a French company that specialises in arena seating. To create the panels used for the 68 silver Olympic podiums, Le Pavé used 18 tonnes of recycled plastic and plastic Styrofoam food containers.
On a recent day, eight workers were bustling around the Aubervilliers factory, where giant bags of recycled plastic beads and chips glistened in a rainbow of colors, some using forklifts to feed beads into special heaters, others feeding finished panels through a cutting machine.
The recycling process itself involves carbon emissions, such as heating ovens and cutting up plastic panels, but Paske says the carbon footprint is still far less than using virgin plastic.
“We're making something beautiful out of old trash that's cluttering the planet,” he said.
The company is opening a second small factory in Burgundy, in the east of France, and is raising funds to open two more in the west and south. Le Pavé's goal is to create jobs by opening small factories as the government seeks to reindustrialize France, Pasquet said, adding that the old model of huge factories no longer meets today's environmental and social challenges.
Le Pavé's Aubervilliers factory put an exclamation point on that statement: All the main equipment was painted bright pink instead of industrial gray. “We want to break away from the old image and give these the new colors of industry,” he said.
The Elysée Palace, the presidential residence, recently had a decorative wall made by Le Pavé installed. The company also produces panels for a major French furniture retailer and has projects underway to produce parquet-style flooring for homes and buildings.
Knowing their idea had come to fruition at the Olympics was a big motivator. “We think we have a chance to create something that will last for years,” Hamelot said. “This is bigger than all of us.”
