Man behind recycled plastic seats in Olympic venues plots ways to stop the trash

Marius Hamelot recalls his fine April morning at the inauguration of the Olympic Aquatics Centre chatting to President Emmanuel Macron as well as a phalanx of politicians and Paris Olympics officials with a mixture of pride, astonishment and self-deprecation.

The 29-year-old was part of the stellar delegation as boss of Le Pavé – the company that produced the 11,000 recycled plastic seats that will be used during the competitions at the venue in Saint Denis, as well as a few kilometres to the south at the La Chapelle Arena.

"I knew that I would have to make a presentation to the president so that was really great to get the opportunity. Something you do once in a lifetime," he beams.

"But afterwards ... walking behind the president ... I didn't know that I would have to stay with everyone.

"It was surprising for me to be there. But I was grateful to see that the message that what we've been trying to put across has been heard and acknowledged."

Countdown

As Macron contemplates a whirl of launches during the 100-day countdown to the start of the Olympic Games, Hamelot can look back and smile wryly at his post-presentation gawkiness.

His own 100-day countdown to the launch of the Olympic extravaganza on 26 July offers, he says, a period of reflection and projection.

Just six years out of the Versailles School of Architecture, the rising son of architects from Argentré-du-Plessis in Brittany will, in just over three months, see the fruits of his labours beamed into millions of homes around the planet.

Thousands of spectators will profit from his innovations during the summer as they sit enthralled at the action unfolding in front of them.

"Of course I'm proud," he says as he perches on a recycled plastic seat around a recycled plastic table in a downstairs meeting room at Le Pavé's bustling headquarters in Aubervilliers on the northern fringes of Paris.

Young team

"I felt like the inauguration of the Aquatics Centre was the end of five years of hard work for this project. It was the end of a really important step for the company.

"But I feel like there is so much to do still."
Having launched Le Pavé in 2018 with childhood chum Jim Pasquet and Judith Sebban, the staff has grown during nearly a dozen moves around Paris to embrace 35 souls.

"It's a really young team," Hamelot says. "And I feel like everyone is motivated to work and to solve the problems we're finding."

Marketing won't be one of the bugbears. During the production of the seats for the Olympic venues, 60 collection points were set up in the region around Paris.

"We asked the inhabitants to bring plastic caps," Hamelot explains. "So that was a part of the project."

The next generation was also drafted in and acquainted with the environmental benefits of recycling, with collecting points in schools around Aubervilliers.

Of the 100 tonnes of plastic collected for the 11,000 seats, 80 percent hails from the area around the capital.

Plastic mix

In the Aquatics Centre, the white seats have come from a mix of the plastics from shampoo and washing up liquid bottles. The tinge of yellow arrives courtesy of bottle caps.

The black seats in La Chapelle Arena? A simple witch's brew of coloured plastics.

The upshot is pure magic. Trash sticks around. "This is really important," Hamelot says.

"Countries don't want to see trash and so we send it to other countries but then since we do that, we are participating. We are creating something that is everywhere.

"It's a nonsense. What we want to do with the project is recycle the trash that is local." 

To that end, a factory has been set up near Chalon-sur-Saône in Burgundy, some 300 kilometres to the south of Paris. Plants are planned for the south and west of France as the company attempts to operate at a national level.

Future benefits

"The seats was a really interesting project because it was kind of a manifesto of what we wanted to show on a national and international scale," Hamelot says.

"And we were speaking about something with both sustainable impact and social impact."

Such features chime with the ethos of the Paris Olympics. Organisers have highlighted that new buildings – such as the 180-million euro Aquatics Centre – will have enduring validity once the Games have left town. 

Macron underlined the point during his eulogy to the workers who constructed the pools which will serve an area of 1.6 million people where statistics had revealed that nearly half of 11-year-olds could not swim. 

"We'll have the Olympic Games," he told around 1,000 people congregated in the stands around the main pool. "But after that this centre will be yours. That's how we wanted it and that's how we planned it."

Hamelot says Le Pavé will benefit too.

Giving back

"After this summer, we'll be able to go to the Aquatics Centre and to the La Chapelle Arena and show our clients how our material can be used.

"It's a part of the heritage of this event in an area that really needs some of this infrastructure.

"We're located in this area so I feel like we're bringing something that we will also benefit from for a long time."

Rarely has such ado about plastic sounded so fantastic. But it is founded on busy times. "Not only because of the seats but because of the demand of our clients," Hamelot says. "At the moment we're distributing the product everywhere in France."

So much for Hamelot's next 100 days.
"When we had the first conversation with the architects, it was really challenging because we had just created the company.

"We didn't have any anything, it was just an idea but the more we passed from prototype to prototype we understood that maybe we will do it and then it became a bit stressful because it was the Olympics.

"So we really had to be on time because it was the reputation of the company that we were creating.

"But getting the opportunity to do just a small part of such an event – it's once in a lifetime." 

But there's a snag amid the Olympic idyll: no places for the outfit that created the seats.

"At one point it was was like, yeah, we we did the seats, so maybe we deserve to have a ticket.

"But then I just realised that hundreds of people worked days and night on the buildings and that they deserved it more than us."

That really is putting the friendly into eco.