INTRODUCTION

When London won the right to host the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games in 2005, the bid team pledged to treat sustainability as a major priority. London 2012 will be the first summer Games to map its complete carbon footprint over the entire project. The ODA aimed to establish sustainability benchmarks for the development of future Games facilities, and to take a lead in best practice that others in UK construction will follow. Many sustainability targets were set and these were enshrined in the ODA's Sustainable Development Strategy^[1].

One tool trialled to support these objectives was a new version of BREEAM. Developed and managed in the UK by BRE Global, BREEAM was first used in 1990. It is now a well-established means of assessing the sustainability of a range of different types of new and existing buildings. This was the first time there was an opportunity for assessments to be created and used for major sports stadia. The intention was to develop a bespoke BREEAM scheme in order to drive reductions in environmental impacts and measure these