Hamelot and Pasquet at their factory in aubervilliers, outside Paris. — ©2024 the New york times Company
THE world’s best athletes will receive their gold medals at the Paris Olympic and Paralympic Games while standing on trash. Recycled food containers, to be exact.
The silver-coloured Olympic podiums, being raised across France, were made in a small factory on the outskirts of Paris by a start-up called Le Pave using 100% recycled plastic, the first for any Olympic Games.
“There is an overabundance of plastic that is harming the environment, but which also has proven economic potential if it can be repurposed,” said Maurius Hamelot, 29, the co-founder of Le Pave, as he darted around his plant, a converted former steel foundry.
That’s not all: Le Pave also made 11,000 bleacher seats for two nearby sports arenas that were built for the Games – all manufactured from used shampoo bottles and millions of multicoloured bottle caps.
Just a few years ago, the company had only three employees. But an unexpected call from Olympic organisers led to a beefy contract and the company has expanded to a staff of 34 and opened two factories.
Seating produced from plastic shampoo containers and bottle caps by Le Pave at adidas arena in Paris. — ©2024 the New york times Company
In the process, it has become a poster child for the Paris Olympic committee, which has pledged to make the Games the greenest in history.
Le Pave is part of an increasingly dynamic start-up culture that has been growing in France, seeded by ambitious policies from President Emmanuel Macron’s government to transform the economy with new industries focusing on clean technology and a green transition.
“It used to be considered a start-up if you just developed software,” said Jim Pasquet, 31, Le Pave’s other co-founder. “We are a new type of industrial start-up, focused on environmental needs, and our goal is to become a European leader.”
Hamelot had already been working to convert plastic waste collected in Parisian neighbourhoods into high-quality components for the building sector.
As an architecture student at the University of Versailles, he had set his sights on the construction industry, one of the biggest sources of carbon emissions.
“The two things common in construction are waste and trash, everywhere in the world,” he said. “How do you reinvent the materials used to build and that won’t harm the environment?”
Hamelot bought a used pizza oven and began to experiment with melting discarded plastic from electronic detritus, including old coffee makers and telephone handsets that he chopped up in a blender.
Tony Estanguet, president of the Paris Organizing Committee for the Olympic games, walking past a podium made from recycled plastic by Le Pave in Paris. — ©2024 the New york times Company
In 2018, he and Pasquet, friends since childhood, created Le Pave and won a series of innovation competitions that got them into La Ruche, an incubator in Paris with a focus on social entrepreneurship, digital technology and crafts and culture, where they raised modest funding.
By 2019, they had patented a thermal compression molding technology for use in the building sector.
Soon after, Hamelot got a call from Solideo, the French company overseeing infrastructure for the 2024 Games, including the new Olympic Village in the northern suburbs of Seine-Saint-Denis that was designed to promote zero waste.
The organisers, who were seeking to slash planet-warming emissions in half compared with previous Games, asked if they would be able to produce 11,000 chairs for a new Olympic aquatic centre and for the new Adidas Arena, which would hold gymnastics and badminton competitions.
“It was an incredible opportunity,” Pasquet said.
Seeded with money from BPI, a French state investment bank that focuses on start-ups, they settled into an abandoned steel factory in Aubervilliers, a low- income suburb of Paris near many Olympic venues.
Hamelot and Pasquet worked with 50 local recycling companies to gather used plastic, experimenting with dozens of prototypes and stress testing before inking a final deal with Solideo in 2022 for the stadium chairs.
Armed with a philosophy that asserts working locally can have a big social impact, they hired employees from Seine-Saint-Denis, including people who had been on long-term unemployment, as well as an asylum-seeker and a former prisoner eager for a fresh start.
The company added an educational dimension, asking a non-governmental organisation Lemon Tree to include 50 elementary and middle schools in the Ile-de-France region.
Around 1,700 schoolchildren collected a million yellow bottle caps that were used to infuse the black-and-white stadium chairs with flecks of colour.
Flecks of coloured plastic from container tops used to add dashes of colour to recycled plastic panels made by Le Pave in aubervilliers, outside Paris. — ©2024 the New york times Company
As they learned about recycling, the children peppered Hamelot with tough questions about the environmental impact of plastics and how to reduce carbon emissions.
“The kids were critical and seriously involved,” he said.
All told, Le Pave used 100 metric tons of recycled bottles and bottle caps to make panels for the 11,000 stadium seats, which were pressed into form by a French company specialising in arena seating.
To create the panels used for the 68 silver-hued Olympic victory podiums, Le Pave used 18 metric tons of recycled plastic and plastic foam food containers.
On a recent day, eight people bustled around the factory in Aubervilliers, where a rainbow of recycled plastic beads and chips stood in huge sacks.
Some workers used a forklift to feed beads into a special heater, while others guided the finished panels through a cutting machine.
The recycling process itself does leave a carbon footprint, including from heating the ovens and cutting the plastic panels. Even so, Pasquet said, it emits much less carbon dioxide than using virgin plastic does.
“We’re making something beautiful out of old trash that is cluttering the planet,” he said.
They are opening a second small factory in the Burgundy region of eastern France and raising funding to open two more in the west and in the south.
As the government seeks to reindustrialise France, Le Pave’s aim is to create jobs by opening small factories, Pasquet said, adding that the old model of mega factories no longer meets today’s environmental and social challenges.
Le Pave’s Aubervilliers factory served as an exclamation point to that statement: all the major equipment was painted bright pink instead of industrial grey.
“We want these to be the new colours of industry, to get away from the old image,” he said.
Recently, the Elysee Palace, the official residence of the president, installed a decorative wall made by Le Pave.
The company is also producing panels for major French furniture retailers and has projects in the pipeline to make parquet-style flooring for homes and buildings.
Knowing that their ideas have come to life for the Olympic Games has been a huge motivator.
“We see that we have an opportunity to build something that will last for years and years,” Hamelot said. “This is about something that’s bigger than all of us.” — ©2024 The New York Times Company
